Who paid for the welfare of the West? Indian pearl in the British crown

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Recently, the image of the West as the bearer of "freedom and democracy" has somewhat faded for any person who does not belong to clinical democracies.

What is “freedom” if it is based on a lie that is completely totalitarianly crammed in, and what is “democracy” under which mass murders of those who will vote differently from the “democrats” are carried out. (The most recent examples are free lies about Assad allegedly throwing chemical bombs, or careful silence about the murder of Donbass residents by the Ukronazis).

But the West-centrists always have a “killer” argument in store. Which way of life do you prefer, Western or like in North Korea? Or in a simplified version. And I suppose you use an American iPhone and (something else) an American one.

To begin with, you can answer the interlocutor, why are you using alphabetical writing, and also numbers, they did not appear in the West at all, and the iPhone, which I do not have, was actually made in Asia.

By the way, a very small country DPRK launches satellites into space, which is not at all given to the vast majority of Third World countries dominated by Western corporations.

And one can imagine what the DPRK would have achieved if it had not been pressed by sanctions and isolation, if it had been a part of the socialist world and participated in the socialist division of labor. And I will certainly prefer the DPRK for residence, and not through and through democratized and liberalized Haiti and Congo. However, let's go a little deeper.

Indeed, many technologies and things were created in the West. And the technological domination of the West is as much an instrument of its domination as the financial one. 1% of the world's population in the West owns half of the world's wealth; the wealth of 62 moneybags, western residents, is equal to the combined wealth of 3.6 billion people of the poorest people on earth *.

And our planet has never known such a pyramid of property inequality (and at the same time inequality of opportunities), such social injustice, neither in the days of feudalism, nor in the days of ancient Eastern despotism.

It is not at all a secret that the technological, financial, informational and military powers of the West are closely interconnected and are instruments of the same system for maintaining Western domination.

Yes, indeed, the West creates complex high-tech things, but it does everything so that the non-West itself cannot create these things, purposefully supporting the backwardness, raw materials or low-tech nature of non-Western economies.

Over the centuries, following the establishment of military and political domination in a particular country, the West destroyed its own system of government, which was replaced by the colonial administration, its language and culture, and often carried out its dismemberment. But first of all, it destroyed its most developed productive forces, its internal market, its usual commodity exchange, its communal and small peasant property.

This was the case in Ireland, the first English colony, in colonial India, in Latin America after the "liberation" from Spanish rule, in China after the Opium Wars, in colonial Africa, and more recently in the post-Soviet space, in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and etc.

Yes, the West has created many technologies that we use, and which are often simply imposed as fashionable and cool, but in fact are instruments of control and brainwashing; in many cases, including in pharmaceuticals, Western products are protected by patents and everyone is obliged to buy only them, no matter how high the price is.

By the way, there are many technologies that were not created by the West at all and formed the basis of human civilization. Wheel, domesticated animals and cultivated plants, ceramics, metalworking, writing, numbers, decimal and hexadecimal counting systems, compass, paper, printing, gunpowder, etc. etc.

The West was not the pioneer in the field of space exploration and the peaceful application of atomic energy - and even today we see that the West does not have manned space exploration, hypersonic aircraft, civilian ships with an atomic engine, industrial fast neutron reactors (and this is what is from Russia).

No Western country has been an example of rapid industrial and technological growth. at the expense of our own resources.

Now fast forward to the middle of the 18th century. China and India provided about 60% of the world's industrial production. The most industrially developed western country of that time - England - could not be compared with them (by the way, 4/5 of the metal used in England was imported from Sweden and Russia.)

England is heavily burdened with debts, her common people are subjected to heavy exploitation, the peasants are driven off the land, deprived of their own means of production and means of subsistence.

The law "on settlement", the bloody "legislation against vagabonds" forced such disadvantaged people to give their labor for a pittance to the very first capitalist - in fact, dooming them to proletarian slavery.

If the workers tried to look for a more suitable employer, they were threatened with charges of vagrancy with punishments in the form of various tortures, prolonged flogging ("until his body was all covered in blood"), imprisonment in a correctional house, where whips and slave labor awaited them from dawn to dawn, hard labor and even execution. [1]

From poverty, people even sold themselves into the most natural slavery on American plantationshowever, the ruthless judicial system also sent them there.

England is poor, in spite of the rich coal deposits so necessary for the start of industrialization, located right in the center of the country; in many areas, coal and iron ore deposits are almost creeping on top of each other. [2]

England is poor despite the advantages of its geography; none of its points is more than 70 miles from the coast of ice-free seas (the cost of sea transportation of goods is ten times lower than the cost of overland transportation, which greatly contributes to the growth of profitability and the rate of capital turnover, the export of finished products and the import of additional volumes of raw materials).

England is still poor for 9/10 of its population, despite two centuries of the arch-profitable English slave trade (the most massive took place in the "Atlantic triangle"), plantation slavery in the American colonies and the ruthless colonization of Ireland, accompanied by land expropriations, extermination and deportations of its indigenous inhabitants.

Still no English product can compare with Chinese and Indian products either in quantity, quality or variety

And so in 1757 England, having played on feudal strife, conquered the Indian state of Bengal and began to conquer the rest of Hindustan. Following the conquest of India, paid, by the way, by the conquered local feudal rulers, a colossal plunder of the whole subcontinent begins.

At first direct, disgustingly arrogant, and then - the so-called "drainage", drain, squeezing juices.

Exploitation through fiscal and customs systems, land tenure systems, trade monopolies, unequal trade exchanges, paying for the wars waged by England, including the conquest of Hindustan itself, etc.

During the first decades of British rule, India pays with colossal hunger, a third of the population of Bengal dies, 10 million people. [3] During this period, India's wealth was pumped into England for a billion pounds sterling at that time. [4] (For 1 then pound sterling.it was possible to live comfortably for a whole month).

And only AFTER such a large-scale robbery in England begins an industrial revolution

Only then a set of technologies for the start of machine production emerges, the spinning machine and the mechanical weaving machine are invented, and the steam engine is introduced.

Only then does the inflow of capital begin to the English industry, the necessary investments and loans come, allowing them to introduce new ones, and new vast markets open up that allow the sale of huge consignments of mass goods of the same type.

And the next 200 years of English capitalism keeps pumping out funds from India, ruthlessly ruining public irrigation and reclamation systems in their own colony, unprofitable for the export of crops and crafts. They are now strangled with cheap products of factory English production, such as weaving ("the plains of Bengal turn white with the bones of weavers"), or actually prohibiting them, such as shipbuilding (and even at the beginning of the 19th century, Indian ships provided half of the trade with England).

Squeezing the juices out of India does not stop for a year, even when its population is driven to mass starvation. The English researcher Digby estimates the size of the "drainage" of India for the period from 1834 to 1899 - at 6.1 billion pounds. ster., which in terms of current money is about 7 trillion dollars [5]. (For comparison, Germany took from France after the war of 1870-71 a contribution of 200 million pounds sterling - the largest in history, which allowed German industry to flourish).

The number of outbreaks of famine and the area captured by it did not decrease with the construction of railways and "technical progress" in colonial India, but, on the contrary, increased - especially since the 1860s. And a century and a half after the beginning of British rule in India, in 1876-1900, famine kills 26 million. Including, from 1889 to 1900 - 19 million people.

During this period, as the English researcher Digby pointed out: “Every minute of the day and night, two British subjects were starving to death.” [6] And India’s total demographic loss was almost double that figure, because famine was accompanied by epidemics that quickly kill emaciated people and the killing of newborn children who could not be fed by their parents.

At the beginning of the 20th century the average life expectancy of a Hindu was 23 years, almost two times less than in the metropolis.

Russian orientalist A. Snesarev makes reasonable conclusions:

one. During the domination of the British, hunger is returning more and more often, its dimensions are more terrible and wider.

2. Since the transition of all of India to British rule, there has been a sharp transition to an increase in the frequency and intensity of hunger."

The main causes of famine outbreaks are: there are no grain reserves in the villages; stocks of valuables in the form of precious metals, etc. practically disappeared from the population; the ancient secular occupations of the people on land and sea have been destroyed; all the benefits of trade go to England; plantations of output export crops (tea, coffee, indigo, jute) are owned by foreigners and make a profit for them; all profitable professions and commercial affairs are exploited by foreigners to the detriment of the natives; foreign (English) capital is a pump for siphoning funds out of the country; economic drainage, taking billions from India, deprives it of accumulated national capital and all the benefits associated with it.

By the way, the last time a mass famine in India took place at the end of British rule - in 1942-1943, claiming 5.5 million lives, primarily in Bengal … [7]

Has India joined the Western way of life? Undoubtedly. As a cheap or sometimes just free resource. Were there people among the native Indian population who benefited from this initiation? Undoubtedly.

In India, huge in terms of population, and even the territory of India, there were only a maximum of 80 thousand Englishmen - officials, military men, businessmen.(If the climate of India would be more suitable for the British and would be recognized as suitable for resettlement colonization, then the Indians would have faced the fate of the Indians and Australian aborigines, exterminated by 90%).

The main work of surviving the juices from their own country, to ruin their own population, was done by the native compradors, zamindar landowners, usurers - shroffs and saukars, military mercenaries - sepoys. (This is a direct parallel with black Africa during the heyday of the slave trade, where the local feudal princelings sold for the goods of the "Western way of life" - rum, beads, hats, mirrors - to the Western slave traders of their own tribesmen, bringing vast territories to desolation.)

And these servants of the English colonialists did not at all object to the English propaganda that the Indians are a lazy, vicious, underdeveloped, slavery-prone people who need a beneficent English rule.

And the British called a lazy underdeveloped people a people whose successes in mathematics were one and a half thousand years ahead of what was achieved in Europe, who created masterpieces of art and literature two and a half thousand years before it became available to the British, who created the state, caring for the well-being of all subjects, two thousand years before the emergence of the "welfare state" in Europe.

The British Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, did not hesitate to call all Hindus "liars", although the successes of the British were based on lies and deceit.

Suffice it to recall how, during the Sipai uprising, the British asked the Maharajah of mountain Gwalior to let them into the citadel for a short time - he agreed. The British did not leave the citadel any more. Maharaja mysteriously died, and the English gentleman officers raked out all his jewelry and took the entire treasury, only gold rupees for 15 billion modern dollars, explaining to the heir that they took it in payment for "protecting his possessions." [eight]

"Virtuous" Englishmen segregated the Hindus, even if they were rajas - different cars, different places to eat. An English official or military man could beat to death a negligent Hindu servant at any moment. [9]

By the way, a real quirk, a fix idea, from the English elite during the 19th and early 20th centuries, was that the Russians were preparing to take away from her the source of her vampire well-being - India. Even Russia's help to the Balkan Slavs and Christians of Western Asia in their liberation from the Ottoman yoke was considered another cunning Russian way to penetrate India. Why England encouraged and supported Turkish atrocities against the Balkan Slavs and Armenians.

On this basis was constantly inflated anti-Russian hysteria and multiplied Russophobic myths, which included not only the demonization of Russia, but also the glorification of "British freedoms" - which the Russian intelligentsia and allied liberals who were steadily leading Russia along the path of peripheral capitalism, gradually turning it into an analogue of a new India for Western capital, were gladly listening to this. And at the same time they applied backstab her country in all the wars that she waged against the Western predators.

Since the liberal elite completely dominated from the 1860s. in the Russian information sphere, then almost everything that was written in Russia about English rule in the colonies, and in India in particular, was honeyed and flattering in relation to the British, allegedly carrying "British freedoms" to the whole world. And it meant that it would be nice to transfer Russia finally under the beneficent rule of the West.

And Mahatma Gandhi, in his struggle for the liberation of India, focused not only on swaraj (government independent of other countries and external forces, the most accurate translation is "autocracy"), but also on svadeshi (domestic national production, the exact translation is "independent making") - boycott of Western goods, rejection of Western lifestyle and even Western clothing. And he won.

Of course, taking into account the fact that the Stalinist USSR would no longer allow the bloody suppression of the Indian national liberation movement, as happened in 1858 or 1919. By the way, there was a legend among the Hindus that the deliverance from the English yoke would come from the North.

Today, the West is gradually but steadily losing its status as an industrial and technological primacy. (The same India is already the third in terms of industrial production, more and more ahead of the same England, and China is the first.)

Following that, the West will lose its financial dominance over the world, both military-political and technological, and sooner or later its brainwashing machine will also collapse.