amartya sen dissimulating

may 8th

amartya sen does not answer kagan's direct question about which muslim
identifies himself/herself as anything other than muslim. kagan does a
little dissumulation himself: fulsome praise of sen followed by a
damaging question that kills sen's argument. sen of course doesn't want
to answer the question because it destroys his "why can't we all get
along?" nonsense. we can't all get along because the semitic types and
the han chinese all want to run the world.

instead, sen recycles his usual pabulum. the man refuses to
comprehend that it is precisely *because* india is a hindu civilization
that it tolerates an italian christist and a mohammedan and a sikh at
the top of the hierarchy. christists and mohammedans (and han chinese)
are practitioners the tyranny of the majority and would never tolerate
such a thing in their civilizations. this is *one* of the salient points
in the clash of civilizations. sen has no idea how racist chinese,
mohammedans and christists are -- after all, he has managed to skate
around on the upper-class side of white society because of his skill at
snaring upper-class white women, including the super-rich and socially
very well-connected rothschild woman.

note sen with his usual, "india bad-bad", pakistan "good-good". he never
misses an opportunity to do this. why? i can only conjecture that there
are large amounts of saudi money somewhere in the picture. now that oil
is moving towards $100 a barrel, there will be more of said saudi money
available so there will be a lot more such statements, especially as sen
is actively campaigning to become president of india. oh, you didnt know
that? his sideys have started this whispering campaign. and the reds
would just love to have him; so would arjun singh. sen's vice president,
of course, will be teesta setalvad, arundhati roy, or romila thapar, or
better still, all three of them. who said we can't have three vice
presidents in india? let's amend the constitution if it says so.

sen keeps quoting the allegation that gujarat 2002 was such a great
issue that the bjp was damaged in 2004 because of it. as a judge edwards
in the us told a lawyer, "your asserting something doesn't make it so".
what proof does sen have for this? or maybe there doesn't need to be
proof, why, sen's a nobel prize winner, so whatever he says is by
definition true. the greater likelihood is tampering with the electronic
voting machines on a large scale got the congress into power in 2004.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:
Date:
From:
To:
References:

Thought you might be interested in reading Amartaya Sen's response.

Swami

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Fro
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: TC
To:
Date: Sat, 6 May 2006 17:54:11 -0700 (PDT)
Subject:
Please see the line marked in red by me in Kagan's letter. It is not a
bad question. Sen ducks it.
Sridhar

From: Robert Kagan
To: Amartya Sen
Subject: Why Is There So Little Evidence To Contradict the "Clash" Theory?
Wednesday, May 3, 2006, at 6:48 AM ET
Dear Dr. Sen,

Let me begin our little correspondence by congratulating you on your
wonderful book. It is (with apologies for the following string of
back-cover-blurblike phrases) elegantly written, powerful, convincing,
humane, and necessary. No doubt our hosts at Slate will be unhappy to
hear this, but I agree with you about almost everything. I agree
entirely when you insist that to interpret the present era as a "clash
of civilizations" is both mistaken and dangerous and that it is
important to view people not by a single identity-as Muslim, "Western,"
or Asian-but as a bundle of identities. Your keenest insight may be that
we need to avoid falling into precisely the trap that Osama Bin Laden
has deliberately laid for us: to divide the world into Muslim and
non-Muslim. Above all, I share your conviction that liberal democracy is
not a cultural phenomenon but a basic human aspiration. I may perhaps go
even further than you in arguing that liberal democracy-which does not
separate peoples by cultures but unites them in common devotion to the
principle of equal rights-is the only durable answer to the present crisis.

I wish I were more optimistic that your arguments will have an impact on
the present discussion. You have restated the core of the liberal
enlightenment worldview, with its belief in the universality of human
nature and in the inherent ability of all peoples to transcend their
cultures and their histories-the conviction embodied in the American
Declaration of Independence. But these are not very fashionable ideas
these days. The metaphor of a "clash of civilizations" has taken hold of
the popular imagination, and once such metaphors take hold they are
easily reinforced by events-the fracas over the cartoons of Mohammed in
Europe, for instance, or the violence in Iraq-and even, as you argue, by
well-meaning efforts to ameliorate the confrontation by "building
bridges" between the cultures. In intellectual circles, meanwhile,
self-described "realists" are temporarily back in vogue arguing that the
attempt to "impose" democracy in places like Iraq (or Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Egypt, etc.) is doomed to failure. We are told that Iraqis and
other peoples are not "ready" for democracy. And even the successful
elections in Palestine are cited as evidence of the failure of democracy
because the "wrong" people were elected.

We would both dispute these claims, I think. You're right to argue that
the shortcomings of the democratic process in Iraq are less the failure
of the Iraqis-who have shown an extraordinary commitment to the idea of
democracy despite horrendous obstacles-but of an American intervention
that succeeded in ousting Saddam Hussein but then failed to provide
adequate security and stability to rebuild the country. And I would like
to hope that the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections can
promote the idea of multiple identities that you describe: that people
can be both Islamists and democrats. But I find very few people who
believe those two identities can coexist.

Certainly, one problem we face is that there often seems to be so little
evidence to contradict the "clash of civilizations" explanation of our
era. Why, for instance, do we not see more Muslims publicly insisting
that their other identities be given greater prominence? If it is true
that liberalism is not a Western phenomenon-and I agree that it is
not-why don't we see more Muslim leaders, intellectuals, and
opinion-makers pressing for it? You offer a good explanation for some of
this reticence: The non-European world, after a long history of
colonization, harbors resentments and "anti-Western" sentiments that
tend to shape identity. But when will we see more people break out of
this straitjacket? Or is that already happening, and I've just been
missing it?

In Iraq, for instance, you are right that there has been an increasing
tendency to treat the country as if it were nothing more than a group of
sects. But, on other hand, there does not seem to be much insistence on
the part of Iraqis themselves to be treated differently. At least this
does not show up very noticeably in the political process. No doubt the
United States is partly responsible for this: Because the intervention
force did not provide sufficient security, as Noah Feldman and others
have argued, Iraqis had to find their own means of security, and they
turned naturally to their ethnic groups for protection. And, as you
argue, our political policies may have reinforced the tendency toward
sectarian identity. But I wish one could see more evidence of a
countervailing desire on the part of Iraqis to transcend this
sectarianism. And in the Muslim world more generally, who is standing up
and demanding to be seen as more than simply a Muslim?

If there was one thing missing from your book, it is a deeper
explanation of this failure. Perhaps in your response to this note, you
can offer your thoughts on the dog that does not bark loudly enough to
be heard.

With great admiration and all best wishes,

Bob

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Amartya Sen
To: Robert Kagan
Subject: Was World War II a "Clash of Nationalities"?
Wednesday, May 3, 2006, at 3:07 PM ET
Dear Mr. Kagan,

I am delighted to receive your observations, both because of your
extremely kind and generous comments on my book Identity and Violence
and because of the interesting and engaging questions you have put to me.

I am pleased, of course, that you do not disagree with my thesis on the
importance of a person's various affiliations and associations and the
resulting multiplicity of identities that any human being has, nor with
the need for reasoning and choice in determining the priorities over
them in any particular context. But you ask the powerful question of
who, in "the Muslim world," is "standing up and demanding to be seen as
more than simply a Muslim?" You point out that you missed in my book a
deeper explanation of this failure. And on the general subject of a
supposed "clash of civilizations," while you accept my rejection of that
thesis (I am very encouraged by your support on this), you also make the
extremely interesting point that "there often seems to be so little
evidence to contradict the 'clash of civilizations' explanation of our
era." I agree that it does "often seem" that the general thesis of
"civilizational clash" fits the ground reality very well. But does it
really?

As you know, my book is very concerned not only with the multiplicity of
our identities, but also with the way the illusion of a solitary
identity, increasingly defined in terms only of religion, has been used
to cultivate violence in the world. The so-called Islamic terrorists
have used this weapon with great effectiveness. But to interpret that
effectiveness as proof that there really is an inescapable clash of
civilizations would be like constructing a thesis of an irresistible
"clash of nationalities" on the basis of the observation of the ground
reality of the two huge world wars of the 20th century. To consider
another analogy, to see in the supremely bloody Hutu-Tutsi violence of a
decade ago the "proof" of the inescapability of a "Hutu-Tutsi clash"
would be to ignore not only how that violence was deliberately
cultivated, and also ways that, with appropriate development of
political interactions and civil society, such fostered violence can be
resisted and overcome, as it increasingly is. Similarly, the ground
reality of the Holocaust is no evidence that the gentile Germans are
doomed to be inescapably Nazi.

Indeed, Western parochialists and Islamic extremists have, I fear, an
implicitly shared involvement in arguing for the primacy of a person's
religious identity, leaving a person no room for entertaining the
demands of other affiliations and associations. And yet other
commitments have flourished. For example, business has grown in the
world across the barriers of regions and cultures, wherever the
opportunities have existed and have not been stifled, focusing on a
different kind of economic identity. Interestingly, anti-big-business
movements have also grown across regional and cultural boundaries and
have led to one of the most global movements in the world, under the
somewhat deceptive name of "anti-globalization movement." Belief in
religious separation and the allegedly inescapable hostilities linked to
it has to come to terms with the existence of other powerful forces
related to other identities-economic, political, social, linguistic, and
many others. The theory of an overarching "clash of civilizations" not
only has to face the difficult problem of explaining so many different
types of movements in the world today, it would not be able to provide
much of an explanation for some of the most prominent political
developments in contemporary history, such as the separation of
Bangladesh from Pakistan, which happened despite the fact that they
shared the same religious identity (more than 100 million Bengali
Muslims supported-and fought for-the assertion of a Bengali identity in
addition to their Muslim identity).

Let me also consider my own country, India. Samuel Huntington describes
it simply as a "Hindu civilization." That description may seem a little
odd since India, with its 145 million Muslims, has more Muslims than
almost any other country in the world, including those that are firmly
placed by Huntington within "the Muslim civilization." But Huntington is
right that the vast majority of Indians come from a Hindu
background-more than 80 percent, in fact. And yet, if you look at the
three principal governmental positions in India, none of them is held
today by a Hindu: The president is a Muslim (Abdul Kalam), the prime
minister is a Sikh (Manmohan Singh), and the leader of the ruling party
(Sonia Gandhi) is a Christian of Italian ancestry. Not only is this
situation the result of a democratic electoral process, you will detect
no sense of the country being in a state of explosion for this reason.
This despite the fact that there have been systematic attempts at
cultivating the divisions of religious identity, often quoting
Huntington himself. There were even killings of minorities in the riots
of Gujarat in 2002, which ended up, in the Indian general elections of
2004, as a major vote-loser for the party that seemed implicated in that
violence.

But what about Pakistan, which is so often seen as just a hotbed of
Islamic militancy? The crucial issue here is the role that has been
played by the undermining of democracy, particularly secular democracy,
in Pakistan by a sequence of military leaders. It is also important to
see how the civil society in Pakistan has tried to offer its own
resistance through courageous pursuit of non-sectarian causes, such as
the development of a powerful human-rights movement, reliant largely on
the support of the civil society. One of the most significant recent
developments in South Asia is the emergence of bold and powerful media
in Pakistan. Not only do you hear very little about this in the Western
press: Reports of clash get priority over positive civil engagements,
despite the immensely larger number of people who are involved in
construction rather than in destruction.

Before I end, may I reverse our roles and ask you a question? We may
have taken, I believe, somewhat different positions on the wisdom of the
military intervention in Iraq (I was-and am-firmly against it). But I do
agree with you on the crucial importance of democracy in the world and
also on the ability of people outside to help the development of
democracy in a country that is currently deprived of it. (I am
convinced, for example, that the economic boycott of the
apartheid-dominated South Africa helped to pull that regime down.) We
also agree that after the intervention, the occupation forces "failed to
provide adequate security and stability to rebuild the country." I would
also argue that the neglect of the civil society and of the need for
public reasoning (with a free and inclusive media) has been one of the
major problems. But what about the military intervention itself? I would
be very curious to know how you see that question now.

Again, very many thanks for your very kind and extremely perceptive
comments and questions.

Yours,
Amartya