In offices that used to house India’s planning commission, Sanjeev Sanyal, an economic adviser to the prime minister, is pursuing what he calls “process reforms”—small tweaks to streamline government as opposed to big structural changes like overhauling the tax code.
Take the process of closing a business. In 2021 it took 499 days on average and involved placing advertisements in newspapers. By last year it took only 90. Applying for patents, too, used to be an ordeal owing to a shortage of qualified staff to review the claims. Hundreds have been hired and the number of patents granted has risen from 6,000 in 2015 to more than 100,000 last year.
Other agencies have been abolished or shrunk. Gone are the Tariff Commission, which was set up in 1951 but never set any tariffs (the commerce and finance ministries did that), the All-India Handloom Board, the All India Handicrafts Board and the Central Organisation for Modernisation of Workshops. Several film-promotion organisations, including the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Children’s Film Society, have become one.
There is much more to do. Despite heavy investment in India’s ports, ships often get stuck waiting for customs and security clearances for their cargo. It can be so hard to claim any money from the Provident Fund, the national pension scheme, that many workers see contributions as a tax rather than a form of savings. But at least there is now a process for process reforms.
Editor:The Economist was the subject of Alexander Zevin’s revelatory Biography:
Editor: Minding the business of the world is the Intellectual/Political/Moral high ground, that this last remaing figure of British Imperialism, The Economist: representative of the Oxbridger Cadre and their fellow travelers. The propaganda value of the reach of this publication began with John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge: The Right Nation a convoluted apologetic for Bush The Younger, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld & Karl Rove Mr. 1%!
Editor: Where might The Reader look to for a critical analisis of British Imperialism?
Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.
New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.
It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.
How did this come about?
It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.
Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third)to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.
How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years
Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined.
Recent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire. High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history.
This rosy picture of colonialism conflicts dramatically with the historical record. According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen, extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century. Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and more deadly. Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history.
Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.
Editor: Recall Zanny Minton Beddoes’s appearance on The Daily Show, in leather pants, to shill for the War in Ukraine. Beddoes’s was also part of Jeffrey D. Sachs’ army of Neo-Liberals:
Headline: Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist
By Peter Passell
June 27, 1993
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And even his sympathizers acknowledge that Sachs’s high profile and world-class impatience could generate a backlash in a nation still adjusting to the reality that it is no longer a superpower. “There’s a real dilemma here,” says Stanley Fischer, an international economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to make a lot of noise to get the attention of the West. But the more noise you make, the more you make it seem that the reform program is a Western program. And that could be the kiss of death.”
Anne Applebaum’s re-published essay: ‘The New Puritans’ from October 2021. That is framed by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Note that brevity is not an attribute of Neo-Cons: exhausting the readers patience, and short circuiting critical thinking, via the exercise of a self-serving verbosity is central, in fact, the sine qua non of the Straussian! The word count of this essay is 7,896 !
Here are two telling paragraph on Applebaum’s that frame her report on a select number of the victims of ‘the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob’:
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I have been trying to understand these stories for a long time, both because I believe that the principle of due process underpins liberal democracy, and also because they remind me of other times and places. A decade ago, I wrote a book about the Sovietization of Central Europe in the 1940s, and found that much of the political conformism of the early Communist period was the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure. Even without a clear risk to their life, people felt obliged—not just for the sake of their career but for their children, their friends, their spouse—to repeat slogans that they didn’t believe, or to perform acts of public obeisance to a political party they privately scorned. In 1948, the famous Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik sent what he later described as some “rubbish” as his entry into a competition to write a “Song of the United Party”—because he thought if he refused to submit anything, the whole Union of Polish Composers might lose funding. To his eternal humiliation, he won. Lily Hajdú-Gimes, a celebrated Hungarian psychoanalyst of that era, diagnosed the trauma of forced conformity in patients, as well as in herself. “I play the game that is offered by the regime,” she told friends, “though as soon as you accept that rule you are in a trap.”
But you don’t even need Stalinism to create that kind of atmosphere. During a trip to Turkey earlier this year, I met a writer who showed me his latest manuscript, kept in a desk drawer. His work wasn’t illegal, exactly—it was just unpublishable. Turkish newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses are subject to unpredictable prosecutions and drastic sentences for speech or writing that can be arbitrarily construed as insulting the president or the Turkish nation. Fear of those sanctions leads to self-censorship and silence.
Applebaum engages in an unsurprising use of historical/political hyperbole of the Soviets, while neglecting, the most proximate occurrence of Backlisting of the McCarthy Era in America!
The partial list of victims:
one academic told me.
A journalist told me
One professor
Another person suspended
Ian Buruma
One editor said
one academic told me
Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor
Daniel Elder, a prizewinning composer
poet Joseph Massey
Stephen Elliott, a journalist and critic
one of the academics I interviewed
David Bucci, the former chair of the Dartmouth brain-sciences department (suicide)
Nicholas Christakis, the Yale professor of medicine and sociology
Robert George, a Princeton philosopher who has acted as a faculty advocate for students and professors who have fallen into legal or administrative difficulties,
Joshua Katz, a popular Princeton classics professor,
Mike Pesca, a podcaster for Slate
Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,
Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld,
This list of victims is interrupted by examples of ‘Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution…’.
Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries, from the Argentine junta to Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution, Mao empowered students to create revolutionary committees to attack and swiftly remove professors. In both instances, people used these unregulated forms of “justice” to pursue personal grudges or gain professional advantage. In The Whisperers, his book on Stalinist culture, the historian Orlando Figes cites many such cases, among them Nikolai Sakharov, who wound up in prison because somebody fancied his wife; Ivan Malygin, who was denounced by somebody jealous of his success; and Lipa Kaplan, sent to a labor camp for 10 years after she refused the sexual advances of her boss. The sociologist Andrew Walder has revealed how the Cultural Revolution in Beijing was shaped by power competitions between rival student leaders.
Again no mention of that indigenous American Political Inquisitors, the McCarthy coterie , or its weapons, the in-order-too of maintaining one’s status were being a ‘friendly witness’, naming names, and the Loyalty Oath for those working or applying for jobs. And if in the Entertainment field being ‘cleared’ by ‘Red Channels’.
I have just reached page 14 of my copy of Applebaum’s essay. In total, there are 27 pages. Just from these 14 pages, its clear that Applebaum is writing propaganda of a very particular kind! ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warned against an internal enemy: ‘that coddled students have learned to fear free speech’.Applebaum constructs a victimology, and the Inquisitors who seek to destroy what James Madison so prized! Applebaum supplies the answer to the besieged professors. Note that professors are the single class, of civic political actors, who qualify for ‘moral and legal support’!
Robert George has created the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group that intends to offer moral and legal support to professors who are under fire, and even to pay for their legal teams if necessary. George was inspired, he told me, by a nature program that showed how elephant packs will defend every member of the herd against a marauding lion, whereas zebras run away and let the weakest get killed off. “The trouble with us academics is we’re a bunch of zebras,” he said. “We need to become elephants.” John McWhorter, a Columbia linguistics professor (and Atlantic contributing writer) who has strong and not always popular views about race, told me that if you are accused of something unfairly, you should always push back, firmly but politely: “Just say, ‘No, I’m not a racist. And I disagree with you.’ ” If more leaders—university presidents, magazine and newspaper publishers, CEOs of foundations and companies, directors of musical societies—took that position, maybe it would be easier for more of their peers to stand up to their students, their colleagues, or an online mob.
This New York Times essay from December 16, 2009 should puts Prof. George into proper historical/political perspective:
Headline: The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker
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At the center of the event was Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a Roman Catholic who is this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker. Dressed in his usual uniform of three-piece suit, New College, Oxford cuff links and rimless glasses, George convened the meeting with a note of thanks and a reminder of its purpose. Alarmed at the liberal takeover of Washington and an apparent leadership vacuum among the Christian right, the group had come together to warn the country’s secular powers that the culture wars had not ended. As a starting point, George had drafted a 4,700-word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage.
Two months later, at a Washington press conference to present the group’s “Manhattan Declaration,” George stepped aside to let Cardinal Rigali sum up just what made the statement, and much of George’s work, distinctive. These principles did not belong to the Christian faith alone, the cardinal declared; they rested on a foundation of universal reason. “They are principles that can be known and honored by men and women of good will even apart from divine revelation,” Rigali said. “They are principles of right reason and natural law.”
Even marriage between a man and a woman, Rigali continued, was grounded not just in religion and tradition but in logic. “The true great goods of marriage — the unitive and the procreative goods — are inextricably bound together such that the complementarity of husband and wife is of the very essence of marital communion,” the cardinal continued, ascending into philosophical abstractions surely lost on most in the room. “Sexual relations outside the marital bond are contrary not only to the will of God but to the good of man. Indeed, they are contrary to the will of God precisely because they are against the good of man.”
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Anne Applebaum assumes that the reader will not do an internet search for Prof. George. As a reader of the New York Times, I recalled reading this news story.
FEW FIGURES have loomed as large in American political life as Donald Trump. Even out of office, the celebrity-turned-president has had an extraordinary capacity to set the political agenda, move popular sentiment and polarise Americans. Mr Trump’s return to power has underscored all this. But he is not impervious to public opinion. His second term will be shaped, and constrained, by the views and priorities of ordinary Americans. On this page, The Economist is tracking their opinions week to week, throughout his presidency.
Every week YouGov, an online pollster, asks 1,500 American adults how they feel about a range of topics. We have collated their responses to these surveys since 2009, including the latest data on the most pressing political issues—from immigration and the state of the economy to gun control and health care. The result is a snapshot of Americans’ shifting views on their politics and society over the past 16 years.
Editor: Influence Watch supplies some enlightening information about the relationship with clients, and their particular needs, and the YouGov’s ‘points systems’ (see the italicised portions below).
YouGov is a British polling company founded in 2000 by Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim Zahawi. YouGov has 20 million members worldwide whom it surveys, along with 1,600 employees across 39 offices. 1
YouGov claims to be non-partisan. It is often accused of displaying bias toward the U.K. Conservative Party due to its founders’ associations with the party, but the company has had high-level figures who have supported the British Labour Party, 2 and the firm worked with the left-of-center Voters’ Right To Know coalition. 3
YouGov creates and conducts polls for its clients around the world. YouGov attracts poll takers by distributing “points” which can be redeemed for cash and gift cards. Select poll takers can join YouGov Pulse as “panelists” for additional points.4
While most polling companies survey random individuals to avoid selection bias, YouGov’s polling model is based on tracking the shifting of preferences of the same individuals over time. YouGov’s panelists are used repeatedly for polls, and polling data is correlated with a large amount of political and non-political information surveyed from these panelists. 5
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Editor: Here is a link to ‘Influence Watch’ sight:
Editor: The reader might well speculate on the economic relationship of YouGov’s ‘points systems’ to The Economist! Or the fact that YouGov poles the same indivituals over time. Where might these repedative practices lead: in terms of questions asked that could be skewed to meet the political needs of Clients. Even given this assurence of ‘polling data is correlated with a large amount of political and non-political information surveyed from these panelists. 5To call the relationship between The Economist and YouGov symbiotic is hardley an exageration !
“Is Edward Snowden a traitor: yes or no?” Gabbard was asked by successive Democratic senators, including Bennet.
“Snowden broke the law,” said Gabbard. “He released information about the United States … I have more immediate steps that I would take to prevent another Snowden.”
“This is when the rubber hits the road,” Bennet retorted, demanding a “yes” or “no” answer. “This is not a moment for social media. It’s not a moment to propagate conspiracy theories … This is when you need to answer questions of the people whose votes you’re asking for.”
Those questions were foreseen by Snowden himself, who wrote in a tweet on Thursday that Gabbard would be “required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation”.
“I encourage her to do so. Tell them I harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff,” he said. “In DC, that’s what passes for the pledge of allegiance.”
The committee is expected to hold a closed session to discuss sensitive matters later on Thursday and then would move to a vote “as soon as possible”. said Tom Cotton, the committee chair.
“Obviously we didn’t select this nominee,” said Bennet, Gabbard’s most vocal skeptic. “But can’t we do better than somebody who doesn’t believe in [Fisa law] 702? Can we believe that somebody who can’t answer whether Snowden was a traitor five times today, who made excuses for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?”
Editor: Can a Senate fully owned by @AIPAC represent American Interists?
Editor: Reader beware of the caviets, of the publisher, aboutMr. Rubin , lets name them prejudices, against the ‘The Great Man Rehnquist’, notorious aficionado of ‘The Hanging Judge’!
‘The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist’
So how does Jenkins square a case like Dickerson with his theory of Rehnquist’s anti-liberal, “better point of view” jurisprudence? He surmises that Rehnquist’s decision in Dickerson was written to make police officers’ lives easier, because a decision declaring the Miranda warnings unnecessary would have created a situation in which some officers might be told to stop using the warnings altogether, thus bringing about a potentially annoying change in cops’ daily routines. Therefore, Jenkins concludes that Dickerson “actually comported with Rehnquist’s law-and-order credo in some way.”
In addition to the “better point of view” rationale, a second theme of Jenkins’s in assessing Rehnquist’s criminal law jurisprudence is the influence of one of Rehnquist’s college professors at Stanford, Charles Fairman, who, Jenkins writes, was both “a darling of the political right at a time of great racial upheaval in postwar America” and “Rehnquist’s mentor and role model.” Fairman assigned his constitutional law class a book that was the first that Rehnquist had ever read on the U.S. Constitution. (It was written by Professor Fairman, of course.) The book was a biography of former Supreme Court Justice Samuel Miller, who served during the time of Abraham Lincoln. According to Jenkins, “[Miller] . . . played an important role in limiting the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the three constitutional amendments collectively known as the Civil War Amendments [(the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth)].” Fairman sympathized with Miller’s view, and, more generally, with the notion of “inherent danger from an infringing central government.” From this, Jenkins traces Fairman’s influence to then-Chief Justice Rehnquist’s 5-4 opinion for the Court in United States v. Morrison (2000), which struck down the provision of the Violence Against Women Act that allowed victims of gender-motivated violence to sue their attackers in federal court. The Rehnquist-led majority relied partly on United States v. Harris (1883) and The Civil Rights Cases (1883)—cases which, broadly speaking, emphasized the limited powers of the federal government—in interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment; Jenkins argues that Fairman’s teaching was evident in Rehnquist’s opining that the matter sub judice—violence against women—was better left to the states, based on Rehnquist’s (via Fairman’s) reading of the framers’ intent.
A third, and perhaps the most harped-on theory by the author, is Rehnquist’s documented admiration of Judge Isaac Parker, “the hanging judge,” who served the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas in the late-nineteenth century. Judge Parker’s career was notable for the alacrity with which he ordered the executions of condemned criminals, “carr[ying] out more death sentences, more quickly, than anyone else in American history.” Rehnquist was apparently fascinated with this judge, and Jenkins is apparently fascinated with Rehnquist’s fascination, dedicating an entire chapter (Chapter Eight) to the judicial kinship, and consistently referencing the hanging judge and how his impact is evident in Rehnquist’s legal opinions. When Parker arrived on the federal bench, his death sentences were not reviewable, owing to congressional failure to provide jurisdiction for such appeals, and “[a]fter Supreme Court review was instituted, Parker complained that many of his sentences were overturned on technicalities—an opinion with which Rehnquist agreed.” One of Jenkins’s motifs of Rehnquist’s jurisprudence is a disdain for appellate review generally, and the author leans heavily on Judge Parker as empirical support for this legal viewpoint.
The “Hanging Judge” chapter is actually one of the headier sections of the book in terms of legal discussion, and it is there that Jenkins cites several laws and opinions to either imply or explicitly state Judge Parker’s influence on Rehnquist’s criminal law philosophy, including: Gray v. Lucas (a 1983 denial of a stay of execution in which then-Associate Justice Rehnquist concurred, a case he considered to be an example of the over-generosity of modern habeas corpus law); Furman v. Georgia (the 1972 case invalidating the death penalty where Rehnquist “led[] the four new Nixon appointees in dissent”); Gregg v. Georgia (the 1976 case reinstating the death penalty where Rehnquist was in the majority); McCleskey v. Kemp (the 1987 case on racial disparities in the distribution of capital punishment, where, as Jenkins puts it, “with Rehnquist now the new chief justice, the Court closed off yet another line of attack on death penalty”); the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) (limiting habeas petitions), and Felker v. Turpin (a unanimous 1996 opinion written by Rehnquist affirming the constitutionality of the AEDPA). With all of this cited, Jenkins looks back and concludes that “one would find it all too easy to see Rehnquist’s continuing admiration of Hanging Judge Parker.” It’s hard to say whether Rehnquist was thinking about Parker when he put his pen to paper, but to Jenkins’s credit, the author comes closer to engaging in a thorough review of Rehnquist’s legal opinions than he likes to admit. Yet, Jenkins doesn’t seem to mention, and certainly doesn’t emphasize, the fact that Parker was personally opposed to capital punishment. Whether this makes the Parker-Rehnquist connection flimsier I don’t know, but given the overall tone of The Partsian, which gives no quarter to the old Chief, it would have made sense not only for Jenkins to highlight the apparent contradiction in Rehnquist’s admiration of someone whose personal belief was so opposite his own, but to hammer away at Rehnquist for being so blind as to not realize the paradox. Of course, if Rehnquist was as obsessed with Parker as Jenkins says, then Rehnquist likely knew his views on capital punishment.
So there we have three potential theories for Jenkins’s view of Rehnquist’s criminal justice philosophy: 1) ultra-conservative gut instincts, 2) a college professor, and 3) a “hanging judge.” It might be more complex than this, but Jenkins doesn’t think so, as he writes, “[w]ith Rehnquist’s credo one didn’t have to connect many dots. It was a simple politico-judicial philosophy.” Jenkins sizes Rehnquist up and concludes that “[his] self assurance reflected the majoritarian homogeneity of Shorewood[, Wisconsin, Rehnquist’s hometown,] and the simplicity of an earlier time when white men ruled. . . . If you were not in the majority you could not expect protection against the majority’s views, except in the few narrow, negative areas.” The Partisan is full of such anti-Rehnquistian aphorisms, many more than can fit in this review.
On the whole, Jenkins addresses case law to the extent that it fits within his view of Rehnquist’s politics. If Rehnquist is just a politician in robes, then treating the topic this way makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, however, Jenkins’s laser-like focus on Rehnquist’s conservatism sometimes forces the author to bring himself down along with his subject. For example, Jenkins cites Coleman v. Balkcom (1981), an unsuccessful petition for certiorari in a death penalty case, to support his allegation of Rehnquist’s narrow-mindedness. Coleman is an interesting vote line-up, with one dissent written by Justice Thurgood Marshall, dutifully joined by Justice William Brennan, and another written by then-Justice Rehnquist. Rehnquist dissented because, according to Jenkins, “[he] wanted to crank up the electric chair, and he contended that the way to do that was for the Court to accept every death-penalty case until the backlogs on death row were cleared.” Jenkins describes Rehnquist’s opinion as “a live hand grenade being rolled into the middle of the [justices’] conference table. . . . He even quoted Judge Parker, the hanging judge, in a footnote.” This analysis captures not only Rehnquist’s legacy, but Jenkins’s myopia, where the author writes, “[n]ormally it was the liberals who argued for granting certiorari in death-penalty cases, as a way of slowing the pace of executions (indeed, Marshall and Brennan were also dissenters in this case).” The clear irony here is that Jenkins picks Coleman as an example of Rehnquist’s extremism (“his invidious dissent”), but in that same case, Justices Brennan and Marshall were after a result on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. To the degree that Rehnquist’s opinion was the more extreme of the two, it would have been helpful for Jenkins to point out Marshall’s and Brennan’s view that capital punishment was always unconstitutional. With the benefit of full information, readers would understand that Coleman is nothing more than competing ends at play, instead of one side playing by the rules while the other plays politics.
Thus, The Partisan has its shortcomings in the realm of legal analysis; Jenkins sort of admits this upfront. But the author’s true specialty as a journalist shines through as he combs the minutiae of Rehnquist’s life to discover, among other gems, Rehnquist’s changing his middle name from “Donald” to “Hubbs,” on the advice of his mother’s numerologist, who thought that her son would go on to be successful if his middle name began with an “H.” It’s tough to prove a negative.
Speaking of eccentric superstition, a comparison of The Partisan to a recently published book on Scientology, of all things, shows that Jenkins’s deconstruction of Rehnquist could have been stronger. A review of the Scientology book praises the author by opining that “[t]hat crunching sound you hear” is the author bending over backward to be fair to his subject, and the reviewer incisively concludes that “[t]his [bending] makes the book’s indictment [of Scientology] that much more powerful.” Jenkins, on the other hand, doesn’t really bend at all, and the power of his indictment diminishes accordingly. He doesn’t have to bend, of course, but The Partisan’s rhetoric—which casts Rehnquist as some sort of comic book villain: “the young reactionary,” “controlled” by an ideology that commands him to wage “jihad” against liberal ideals and “shatter” stare decisis—might leave readers wondering if they hadn’t picked up the Scientology book by accident, as they read about a whacked-out leader of a suspect sect, who damned all naysayers and left a charming acolyte to carry the torch (think John Roberts as Tom Cruise). In the end, with Rehnquist’s record before us, we can do like Judge Parker (and Jenkins), and promptly hang Rehnquist’s legacy high, or we can stay the old Chief’s reputational execution, and afford his champions the right to a last-ditch appeal. Maybe more than one.
Jordan Rubin is a 2012 graduate of Rutgers School of Law – Newark. His essay on the death penalty’s complicated relationship with the afterlife, Can I Get a Witness from the Population?!, is forthcoming in the Binghamton Journal of Philosophy (SUNY Press 2013)
Editor: What might The Reader make of this New York Times News Story?
Rehnquist Says ’52 Memo Outlined Jackson’s View
By Fred P. Graham Special to The New York Times
Dec. 9, 1971
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In the letter Mr. Rehnquist said that when he was a law clerk for Justice Jackson “the memorandum was prepared by me at Justice Jackson’s request; it was intended as a rough draft of a statement of his views at the conference of the Justices, rather than as a statement of my views.”
Mr. Rehnquist said that Justice Jackson “very definitely did not expect to welcome the incorporation by a clerk of his own philosophical view of how a case should be decided.” Mr. Rehnquist added that the “quite imperious” tone of the memo was different than those usually drafted by law clerks for Justices.
“I believe that the memorandum was prepared by me as statement of Justice Jackson’s tentative views for his own use at conference.”
Furthermore, Mr. Rehnquist said, the view that the “separate but equal” doctrine should be reaffirmed “is not an accurate statement of my own views at the time.”
“I wish to state unequivocally,” he concluded, “that I fully support the legal reasoning and the rightness from the standpoint of fundamental fairness of the Brown decision” that declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. Justice Jackson joined the unanimous Court in that decision.
The memorandum, as released by Newsweek, was captioned “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases.” Mr. Rehnhquist said in his letter that it was entitled “Random Thoughts on the Segregation Cases.”
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Editor: Susequently that ‘memoradum’ mysteriously diappeared from the National Arcihves! In sum Rehnquist defamed Justive Jackson!
From despotisms like the Soviet Union the only voices that tell one anything are the voices of private life. These distinguish the sporadic correspondence of Olga Freidenberg with her first cousin Boris Pasternak between 1910 and 1954. She was in Leningrad, he mostly in Moscow. Forty-five years of this harassed exchange of news and affection come out of their cold envelopes and bring us close to the dire and confusing realities of their time. The cousins were born in 1890 in distinguished and cultivated families who were assimilated Jews. (One can guess at their hopeful childhood and youth in Pasternak’s early writings.) We see them first in 1910 and—after the long gap of the First World War—in touch with each other again through the Second World War and the Stalinist terror, until 1954, the year before she died.
They write to each other as loving friends who are co-equals—as Elliott Mossman, the editor of the letters, says—she the academic, classical scholar whose interests are philology and the history of culture, who has been able to take advantage of the opening of the Academy to women after the Revolution. She became a professor. She was never famous. She survived the Stalin purges by the skin of her teeth—as she wrote in her vigorous diaries that were somehow hidden and now lie in Oxford. (Many passages from these are interleaved with her part of the correspondence.) Her thesis Poetics of Plot and Genre was published in 1936 but in a few weeks was confiscated and denounced because of its “formalism” and scholarly style.
She is said to have been alluring and mischievous as a young girl. Pasternak fell in love with her and this shocked her. She thought of him strictly as a brother. He was too vain, “difficult,” egotistical, incalculable, and elusive; whereas she was strong, settled, and determined in will. Pasternak impatiently threw away letters and records; she was the born archivist who hoarded copies—an alarming gift in a country where all records could be incriminating—but it is thanks to this gift that their letters have survived. A lifetime of letters between two people who rarely met but who had the family bond is a chaos, but Mr. Mossman has made them intelligible by inserting a series of historical introductions to each period of their lives. Her diaries are at their most dramatic in their pictures of the siege of Leningrad and in her account of the scandalous attempt of powerful Party hacks (and Izvestia) to get her dismissed for not being in accord with the changing directives of Marxism. Her difficult and feckless brother Sasha and his uncongenial wife were sent to a labor camp. This imperiled her own embittering situation.
The Pasternak family bond was of great importance to her. She felt it was at the heart of her passionate concern for history. She knew she belonged to a family that was “great and exceptional” in its culture:
In this lies my faith, my faith and absolute reverence for the objective process above and beyond human beings…. I am speaking, of course, not of written history, but of history as a world process. In this process nothing is discarded or forgotten. The ideas about heaven, immortality, the other world, conceived by the peoples of the earth are all true—not as heaven or paradise or Valhalla, but as history. It is impossible to deceive history no matter how documents are falsified or facts distorted and concealed.
She fought back desperately during the purges, when she was officially called upon to fake. The students were directed by the Party to shadow and inform on their professors. She was directed to lower the marks of white-collar workers and to raise those of blue-collar workers. She refused point blank.
It takes a great deal of patience to find the central concern of Robert Colvile latest essay, hidden in the Tory Weeds, his retorical speciality:
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On migration and race in particular, the state has long been similarly reluctant to publicise, or even collect, data that might prove awkward.
Recently a report commissioned by Thames Water became public. It estimated — based on water usage, plus 2017-era migration surveys by Pew Research — that there were between 390,355 and 585,533 illegal migrants in London. But the company had kept the report private. And remarkably the government produces no official estimates of its own — partly because of the decision under a certain Tony Blair to abolish exit checks at the borders.
It’s not just about the number of illegal migrants. We don’t have good data on what nationalities are filling our prisons, or what crimes they committed. Or who is getting national insurance numbers. Or how much they are earning. Sometimes this “data desert” is a result of deliberate obstruction. Sunday Times journalists investigating the infected blood scandal, or the Horizon debacle, can testify to the levels of obfuscation of which the state is capable. Sometimes the explanation is a species of thoughtlessness. We don’t get data on the nationality of criminals, but the police are supposed to record their ethnicity. Yet as the Tory MP Neil O’Brien has pointed out, many officers have stopped doing so, making the statistics worthless.
The reader must give Mr. Colevile credit for this opening gambit, featuring Tony Blair! Colvile on Blair breaks new ground, or just resembles political oportunism: Blair’s quote ‘I quake at the imbecility of it’ is Blair in the confessional? Colvile’s readerships blood quickins!
What was Tony Blair’s worst mistake? I imagine you’ll all have a view. But the man himself offers a surprising nomination. In the middle of his autobiography he breaks off for a page-long rant about the Freedom of Information Act. “You idiot,” he berates himself. “You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it.”
Blair’s argument is that journalists’ use of his new law to expose the government’s secrets prevented ministers and officials from having honest conversations. Its remit, he argues, strayed “far beyond what it was sensible to disclose”.
Editor: The end of Colevil’s intervention does not quite match it’s beginning, I’ll end my comment here!
David Brooks’s political evolution from The Weekly Standard Neo-Con, and author of his ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ now avalable at the Washington Examiner site:
The political evolution of Brooks as writer of not just dubious, but meagar War propaganda, framed by his wan hero ‘20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa’. Reader consider some of the other members of his cast of charcters:
Editor: The Dream Palaces ‘citizenship’ is enumerated in 157 words. Its like a novel written by Ayn Rand!
George Orwell, Fouad Ajami, the Arabists, Western incursion into the Middle East is a Crusade, the Middle East is a Crusade, any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor,any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor,Osama bin Laden becomes an Arab Joe Louis, and Saddam Hussein, who probably killed more Muslims than any other person in the history of the world, becomes the champion of the Muslim cause, the Arab world are never the Arabs’ fault., the Jews, the Zionists, the Americans, and the imperialists who are to blame., of Israelis who blew up the World Trade Center, of Jews who put the blood of Muslim children in their pastries, of Americans who fake images of Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad in order to fool the world. In this palace, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi information minister, was taken seriously because he told the Arabists what they wanted to hear.
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Editor: what remain of this Neo-Con wet dream is 2737 words: what power does this ‘essay’ possesse is to convince the reader to accept as true Brooks’s mastery of the politics of War Mongering. In sum Mr. Brooks writes a long winded ratinalization for Bush The Youngers, Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelds War On Terror: the toxic effects of which are alive and floreishng in the political present!
Editor: The evolution of Brooks from unapologetic war monger, to a New York Times voice of resistance to Trump and Trumpism, places in a conveient shadow, the facts that Brooks was a toxic political actor, who has been very adroit about his carefully crafted political evolution, at The New York Times. To an ersatz ‘voice of reason’ as presented in the first paragraphs of his latest commentary.
After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.
Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.
You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” he declared in his address.
It’s easy to see the appeal. We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were 3,000 miles of railroad track in America. By 1900, there were roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book “The American Mind,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of our 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” So Trumpian.
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