At the zenith of British paramountcy in India, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon opined, ‘the British Raj is, under God, the greatest force for good the world has ever known.’ The Marquess Curzon of Kedleston’s dictum is a trifle bombastic. But this redaction concurs with the spirit of it.

There is much vociferation concerning the Britannic Raj these days. Curiously, Indian politicians hardly castigated it in the first few decades of independence. Only now that those in South Asia who were born under the Union Flag are dying off do we hear such shrill and intemperate invective against the British Raj. It is meet to do homage to the British Raj.

Some will find the very existence of this essay nauseating and objectionable. But however noisome views are they ought to be examined. Etiam diabolus audiatur. It is indicative of the fragility and insecurity of anti-imperialists that many of them think that imperialism discourse should not be permitted a hearing. We have come to a pretty pass when even in Britain it is now all but forbidden to espouse British imperialism. As the laudable maxim audi alteram partem is under threat even in the UK it behoves this essayist all the more to strive to give the lion’s roar.

Demagogues such as Shashi Tharoor inveigh against the British Raj. The Congress politico has striven to use just about every formal logical fallacy that there is. His hyperbole and incessant appeal to emotion renders his diatribe unworthy of serious consideration. The Grand Panjandrum of Trivandrum had the nerve to say, ‘’the British destroyed India.’’ In his mind construction and destruction swapped places. I would remind the Congressman of his national motto: truth alone triumphs.

Much Indian nationalist discourse is racist. They would prefer Indians to be enslaved by other Indians than liberated by Britons. Would slaves in India have been better off not to have been set free? How will nationalists riddle their way out of that?

The legacy of the British Raj makes me call to mind a Monty Python sketch in the Life of Brian. What did the British do for India? Apart from the abolition of slavery, the abolition of sattee, the abolition of torture, gender equality, religious equality, unity, the abolition of human sacrifice, cars, bicycles, roads, railways, ports, airports, the rule of law, telephones, telegraphs, the sewage system, running water, electricity, accurate maps, censuses, watches, clocks, the Gregorian Calendar, schools, universities, hospitals, modern medicine, museums, national parks, the English language, the army, the navy, the air force, the police force, the courts, modern weights and measures, the rule of law, the parliamentary system, the banking system, public limited companies, the stock market, cricket, hockey, yes but apart from all that. What did the British ever do for India? A compendium of the benignity of British rule can scarcely be composed since the good wrought by the British Raj is ineffable.

Dr Tharoor suggests that the defence that the British Raj’s bestowal of all this on India is a worthless argument. If all this infrastructure and all these institutions are valueless, why has India not stopped using them? Even the most inveterate Anglophobe must recognise that the Raj conferred many benefactions on India.

Nationalist tropes have been incessantly dinned into Indians for decades. Many people will be incurable when it comes to such nationalist thinking. By no means everything about Indian nationalism is bad. It is excessive hostility towards the Raj and bias that needs a corrective.

Nothing in this essay could construed to suggest that ethnic Britons are inherently ethical or superior. Britishers are a mixed bunch like every other nationality. But as it so happens the British were in a position to help India from 1600 to 1947 and also to help themselves. And they did.

They say you must not judge a man till you have walked a mile in his shoes. I have sought to put myself in the position of an India. How would I think about the British Raj were I an Indian? The emotional pull of nationalism is irresistible to many. To see the Indian Tricolour float on the winds, to hear the national anthem booming out, to see the gorgeously caparisoned Indian Army parading with pigris erect: it would make my heart nearly burst with pride. There is no mistaking the elation that Indians feel to see their flag borne aloft. The sentimental allure of patriotism is then misused to beguile people into hyper-nationalist thinking. No nationalism is bad per se. But Indian nationalist discourse that is unwarrantedly hostile to the Raj is misguided and unhistorical. There are aspects of Indian nationalists that are praiseworthy. Maintaining the oneness is India is a worthy goal. Centrpetal force ought to be supported. Likewise; British nationalism, Irish nationalism or any nationalism can be distasteful and wrongheaded when taken to the fair. Chauvinism is to be avoided.

Were I an Indian, I like to think I would be sagacious and courageous enough to reject nationalist mythology and the demonisation of the Raj. I would recognise that the Raj was created with free consent of India.

The haughtiness of some Britons would get my goat. It is difficult for those from mighty nations not to feel conceited. But the contumelious attitude of some Britishers in ye olde days towards Indians was nauseating.

The British failure to do more to alleviate famines was one of the Raj’s worst sins. Much more should have been done.

I take pains to avoid cognitive biases in myself. I expose myself to Indian nationalist discourse. I go out of my way to cite the wrongdoings and injustices wrought by the British Isles. I frequently ask myself, could I be wrong? Could it be that the British Raj was dreadful with few, if any, mitigations?

Nirad C Chaudhuri was one of few people valiant enough and wise enough to acknowledge that the British Raj had been desirable. For his fearless assertion of the truth in his magisterial tome Autobiography of an Unknown Indian he was hounded from his job at All India Radio. The grandeur and sonority of his magnum opus recommend themselves to any reader. It is an engrossing work even if its political slant is not your cup of cha. The incorrigible anglophile later found refuge in a more congenial habitat: Oxford.

THE RAJ WAS BY CONSENT

As Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi correctly observed, ‘The English have not taken India. We have given it to them.’ My only bugbear there is the misuse of the term English. As an Irishman I am immensely proud of the major part West Britain played in the glorious story of the Raj alongside our kith and kin from Cymru, Caledonia and Anglia.

M K Gandhi also noted, ‘the English rule here not because of their strength but because we keep them here.’ Gandhi was the doyen of the independence movement yet even he recognised that the British Raj endured due to Indian desire for it.

We are often told that the British Raj was something that the British did to India. It is presented as though Indians had no agency. All the accomplishments and the misdeeds of the Raj were with huge scale Indian participation.

When the East India Company (EIC) first had a ship dock in India it was for trade. EIC was purchasing items in India and selling British goods in India. It only carried on this commerce because it had commodities that Indians wished to purchase and others that they were willing to sell. In time the Mughal Emperor granted express permission for the EIC’s activities. The Mughals looked with disdain at England and Wales at the time. To be fair, India a much larger and mightier country than England and Wales or indeed than the whole British Isles.

India was an is a hoary civilisation. Its accomplishments in mathematics, astronomy, architecture, jurisprudence, philology, philosophy, science, medicine and other fields are most estimable. But having 20% of the world’s population one would assume, all things being equal, that they would be responsible for around 20% of the attainments in any field.

The vagaries of history meant that many dynasties ruled India or portions thereof. Not many lasted more than a couple of centuries. The vicissitudes of politics and economics meant that India’s borders were forever changing. Can India really be said to have continued at all? If you change a hammerhead twice and its handle twice, do you have the same hammer that you started with? The continuance of India as a polity is not as unproblematic as nationalists pretend. The lineage of most nations states is fraught with discontinuities and irregularities. But India’s case is egregiously complex.

The EIC was founded to make a profit. They made no bones about it. It certainly turned a handsome profit.

In time the EIC rented and eventually purchased land as trading posts. These were known as factories. Yet again, the EIC’s acquirement of real estate was by the free agreement of Indian rulers and Indian private citizens.

Commerce must have been mutually beneficial otherwise the EIC would not have prospered through it. If England and Wales were so backward in comparison to India it is curious that Indians choose to purchase its manufactures. The EIC was not selling foodstuffs and the like.

By the late 17^th century, the EIC’s focus has shifted from India’s Arabian Sea Coast to the Bay of Bengal. Though Mumbai was acquired as a wedding present from Catherine of Braganza in 1664, the EIC had Calcutta (Kolkata) as its base from 1690.

There was no grand plan to acquire India. As the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (John R Seeley) said of the British Empire, ‘’it was acquired in a fit of absence of mind.’’ Until the 19^th century it took two years for a message from London to be received in India and then replied to. The British Government had almost no control over the EIC. Even in the 1870s Disraeli lamented the prancing proconsuls in various colonies who were a law unto themselves despite the existence of the telegraph.

In the 18^th century the Mughal Empire went into long term decline. The declension of the empire is usually dated from the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. It was perhaps portentous that the last great Mughal expired the year of the Act of Union. From that date onwards North Britons were also admitted to EIC.

The empire was divided into many provinces. As the empire weakened the provinces acted severally. Each province was ruled by a nawab (governor) appointed by the Badshah. The title nawab was supposed to be non-dynastic. But some nawabs treated them as heritable. When a nawab died his closest kinsman with leaderly qualities often assumed the nawabship. Delhi was usually powerless to stop him. The emperor tended to accept fait accompli.

As the empire grew feeble so there was a concomitant breakdown of law and order. It was slow and gradual at first. But with the fragmentation of the empire came the rise of insecurity. Banditry (dacoity) and piracy were on the rise. Because of this the EIC found it necessary to establish its own army and navy. Its army was overwhelmingly manned by local men. There were a few all white units. At this time, there was no colour bar. The reason for separates units was linguistic and to a lesser degree dietary.

The EIC’s army and navy provided security to Indians. It also provided others with employment.

Britishers were no slouches at piracy themselves. The Royal Navy was forever catching and hanging British pirates. In time of war however, they are granted letters of marque as privateers. They were permitted to predate the commerce of enemy states.

De minimis incipe the EIC became a major landholder. The EIC purchased arable land. It was then able to cultivate some of the crops that it had theretofore bought from Indian vendors. Moreover, it could feed its staff. The EIC also found that renting out land to farmers was a way to make a tidy profit.

The EIC brought modern technology to India. This included watches and navigating instruments. This was one of numberless benefactions from the British Isles to India.

The EIC was not a charity mission. No one pretended that it was. It was guided by self-interest and this was often enlightened self-interest.

We often hear that ‘loot’ is an Indian word. This is taken as proof positive that the EIC was a plunderer. But if so, who taught them that? Why has India not taken an English word for this activity into any of its languages? Britishers did not behave worse in India than at home. It is almost as though Indian nationalist historians would have us believe that no one in the British Isles had ever ransacked anyone else there. Perhaps they have not heard of the Nineteen Long Winters.

The culture of the soil was the mainstay of Indian life. Kinship counted for much. Little had changed in the life of the peasant in millennia.

In 1690 Job Charnock purchased some of the Hooghly riverbank. He was granted it ‘’in absolute sovereignty.’’ Once again, the EIC was there because Indians wanted it to be!

By the mid-18^th century, the Mughal Empire was extant in theory rather than in fact. The badshah’s suzerainty was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. More Indian princes sought alliances with the EIC.

The Mughal Emperor sold diwani to the EIC. Therefore, the Government of India granted the EIC to express and sole right to govern Bengal. Bengal in those times included Orissa, Bihar and what we now call Bangladesh.

The British presence in Bengal stimulated commerce. Siraj ud Daula was a Nawab of Bengal who seized Calcutta from the EIC. He acquired notoriety for his rapacity and sadism. Yet even this convinced anglophobe came to recognise that the EIC was boosting the economy. Amidst of a war against the EIC he opened negotiations to return Calcutta to them because it would be a fillip to the economy.

Most Britons in India in the 17^th and 18^th century certainly admired the country and its ancient civilisation. They had to learn indigenous languages since virtually no Indian spoke English until the 19^th century. Many Britons became adept at these vernacular tongues. They learnt the languages of the upper orders and not the yokels.

Indian was in some senses another Eden. Its warmth and fertility were remarkable. It was demi paradisical to people who hailed from windswept and rainy isles.

The British imagination was fired by India before the 17^th century was out. The first poet laureate John Dryden wrote Aurangzeb. This play was about the reigning Mughal emperor which is why it bore his name. Other British literary luminaries turned their hands to limning India’s glory and fame.

Britons bought objets d’art in India. These were conveyed to the UK whatever their provenance.

The EIC’s acquirement of India was sometimes by Machiavellian machinations. They were ably assisted by Indian allies. Kinship counted for much in India but treachery in a family was not unknown.

Many of those Britishers who voyaged to India in the 18^th century became affluent. They were then homines novi. The role these ‘nabobs’ played in British politics is revealing. Much of anti-EIC diatribe is down to snobbery against these parvenus. A roundtrip from the UK to India took two years. A man would not wish to return to his native shore empty handed. These men often made sure they were rich before their homecoming. But many found that India was their final resting place long before they could amass much capital.

Because of the EIC army and navy, people under EIC rule did not have to suffer the depredations of banditti and pirates. Trade could blossom.

Warren Hastings was the First Governor of Fort William (Calcutta). He is seen as the first viceroy. Hastings strove to improve the lot of the Bengalis. The exactions under Clive had been too heavy. Hastings was keen to ameliorate education and food supply. Hastings realised that there was little interchangeability between India and the UK. What worked well in the United Kingdom rarely sufficed in India.

Even if you think the EIC was morally bankrupt it was not idiotic. It did not want people to die. The EIC made money from taxing people not land. 9/10 Indians were engaged in the culture of the soil. Arable farming does not do itself. EIC also wanted customers for its commodities such as manufactured goods, tea and opium. It was very much in the EIC’s interests to keep people alive.

Extra-European expansion for the UK in the 18^th century was principally actuated by economic consideration. Instrumental rationality guided the EIC. Therefore, it was not in its interests to devastate India.

The impeachment of Hastings was a chance for those who loathed the EIC to calumniate it. Warren Hastings’ repute was not unassailable. He faced formidable rhetors as adversaries. Edmund Burke, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and a third Irishman all lifted their voices against him. Burke overreached himself with his operatics. Such absurdities redounded to Hastings’ advantage. Despite an exhaustive trial for eight years, Hastings was acquitted on all charges. Nonetheless, he suffered pecuniarily since the cost of hiring stupendous barristers was prohibitive.

Many Britishers went native. Some adopted Indian raiment, customs and so forth. Some converted to Mohammedanism. Precious few embraced Hinduism since Hindus do not take proselytes. Some Britons adopted polygyny if they had become Muslims. Concubinage was also accepted practice by upper class Indians of all faiths. It was a custom that some Britons were eager to emulate. There was no bigotry in bed.  By 1800 about a third of British males were married to Indians or in long term relationships with Indian women. We can deduce this from the wills they wrote. If others did not intermarry, that was because they had spouses in the United Kingdom. There was no social more against miscegenation.

India occupied the same place in the British imagination that Egypt had in the Roman imagination. The largest and most fruitful colony was as enshrouded in enigma as it was alluring. In both cases the colony boasted a civilisation far more ancient than that of the metropole and a polytheistic religion of spiralling and bewildering kaleidoscopic complexity. With opium and nautch girls, India proffered sensual temptations such as scarcely be conceived.

Britishers like Sir William Jones found India’s lore and jurisprudence to be awe striking and worthy of the most sedulous scholarship.  This hyperpolyglot was perhaps the most awe striking of British scholars to study India. The Asiatic Society was founded by the Old Harrovian under the patronage of Warren Hastings when he was viceroy. Its purpose was to promote study of all things Indian. He never claimed superordinate status for his race or his native civilisation.

The prodigious labours of Jones deserve recognition. He expanded the corpus of knowledge very substantially. He made Indology increasingly accessible. It was no longer within the confines of Asia that India’s cultural accomplishments were to be known. He awakened interest in India’s folklore all across the globe. There was a revival of interest in such matters in India too.

The Asiatic Society did much for the advancement of community intellectual life in Calcutta. Its influence spread through much of Bengal. The society was a manifestation of British adoration of India’s ancient and enchanting civilisation.  It is a gross refraction of the truth to say that Britons did not respect India.

Jones had spent much of his schooling having a bit of classics knocked into him. I too had to learnt Latin. Multa tulli! However, Jones was a prodigy.

Even North India was far from homogenous. However, the Mughal Court decreed that the official language was Persian. Persian words had ambled sturdily into Hindi. This eventually produced a composite called Urdu as in ‘army’ in Persian since it emerged into the Mughal Army.

When Sir William Jones arrived in Calcutta as a judge at the High Court he plunged immediately into India’s staggering library of literature and theology. He was fascinated by the fact that some Indian Hindus had little notion of calendric time. For them time was circular and no linear. The relative clumsiness of European language was apparent to Jones. The deficiencies of European syntax were thrown into embarrassingly sharp relief when the studied the morphology of certain Indic languages. He was surprised to discover some Indian languages had no preterit. The polylingual Jones was going to have his work cut out attempting the mastery if divers Indian tongues. He began to wonder at the linkage between certain Indian languages and European ones. Being all Indo-European there were more than obliquely related.

Sir William wrote a synopsis of Hindu and Sharia law. The sacrality of these texts meant that Hindu and Muslim scholars were reluctant to engage with them critically. For Jones, these texts were not sacred cows. He could analyse them objectively. Persian was the language of state in North India. Therefore, Sir William rapidly learnt it autodidactically. He also learnt Sanskrit. This British Mezzofanti accomplished mastery of several other Indian languages and a useful knowledge of a few more. His teeming brain was fixated by Hindu mythology. Some of his colleagues were similarly entranced by India’s vast and enrapturing. The legends of ancient India provided spellbinding evocations of a remote age.

Sanskrit had a supranational status. It is the ur language of much of Southeast Asia too. Indonesia was once a Hindu archipelago. Hinduism only survives on Bali. Hinduism never had a political coeval unlike Islam or Catholicism. Sanskrit was so elite that it did not imbue more than a handful of scholars with any consciousness of an international society.

Jones did not pursue the study of Indian Law merely because it caught his intellectual fancy or from sheer caprice. He considered it to be his bounden duty. He had to comprehend India’s legal traditions in order to do justice in India. His digest of the laws of India was very durable. It was used by juriconsults a century after his death.

Magna opera of Sir William are too numerous to name. Jones was a lexicographer and a grammarian of Indian languages. He understood them in granularity. He was a fantastic litterateur. Because of him print treasuries of these languages were created. His stunning attainments merit adulation.

A plaque dedicated to Sir William stands in the chapel of his old college: University College, Oxford. Some unkind souls have demanded that it be removed. The sourness they feel towards a man filled with admiration for India is dispiriting. Some malaperts and mean-spirited persons have accused him of sundry offences. The polemical nature of much comment on Jones is depressing. I tremble at the hideous spectacle of one who lived India so well being execrated by the descendants of the people he served.

The status of Hindu and Islamic law was loudly and self-consciously defended by its adherents. The EIC was only too happy to uphold this. These laws have still not reached obsolescence today when it comes to family matters. English common law is not considered an apt substitute for such affairs.

The Indian Civil Service (ICS) is one of the finest legacies of the British Raj to India. The ICS’s incorruptibility is attested to even by the Raj’s most implacable foes. The legatees of the Raj chose to kept this efficient organ intact. The unheard-of concept of disinterested public service was introduced with the ICS. It was unknown in previous epochs.

The ICS was not sinecure filled. It was because it was a profession that offered career progression that the middle strata of society became influential. Kinship counted for naught in the ICS. There was no nepotism. Meritocracy was introduced. This led to personalisation. A man could be judged on his merits. This was to have reverberations for all areas of life.

Much though independent India has wanted to be autarchic it often relies on British creations. A full flowering of India has only been possible when independent India jettisoned socialism and allowed free play to capitalism.

At that stage the EIC was using Persian as its language of administration. It was comprehended by the ruling class in North India. Urdu was then only semi-standardised. At the time Urdu was widely perceived as a bastard blend of Hindi and Persian and did not have the status of a respected language.

The intricacies of Indian courtly life were coming to be understood by Britons in India. Being so gigantic the customs and mores of Indian courts differed markedly across such a variegated subcontinent.

The British reverence for India’s splendiferous accomplishments is hardly indicative of white supremacism or racialist disdain for India. Viceroys were later to enrobe themselves in Indian attire and accoutre themselves with Indian paraphernalia. Governors-General rode elephants. They even consciously imitated the pomp and pageantry of the Mughal Empire once they had supplanted it and held durbars.

There was no colour bar. White babies were often suckled by Indian ayahs. There was social as well as sexual intercourse between whites and Indians. Admittedly this decreased markedly with the arrival of serious numbers of memsahibs in the 19^th century.

Until the late 18^th century EIC positions were open to Indians too. Some Indians joined the EIC and rose high in it. Then Lord Cornwallis introduced racially discriminatory laws. Indians and those of mixed stock were no longer permitted to have these posts. Indians were held by Lord Cornwallis to be unfit for higher posts. This vulgar deduction was an outgrowth of racialist assumptions. Rightly, many felt indignation about this wrongheaded and unjust policy. Nonetheless, Indians were welcome as guests as the viceregal palace. Even his lordship did not want Indians to be mere peons.

The EIC only existed because Indians wanted it to exist. This incontrovertible fact is deeply inconvenient for Indian nationalists. Yet it is indelibly stamped on the minds of many Indians that the British Raj was unpopular.

By the end of 18^th century the EIC was supporting the Mughal Empire again. Shah Alam II was able to live in opulence once more. Law and order were restored by the British.

Britons always knew that British dominion in India was temporary. Even in the 1780s Warren Hastings penned that eventually British rule would be, ‘’lost to remembrance.’’ Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote that British rule would come to an end when there was an Indian leadership ready to replace it. He was writing in the 1830s. You might disagree with Macaulay’s assertion that Indians were unfit for self-governance in the 1830s. Macaulay’s Minute on Education in 1836 has achieved notoriety for his unpalatably scathing dismissal of Indian learning. Macaulay’s ignorance and arrogance was distasteful and did him no credit. Nonetheless, his wish to provide better education in India was surely laudable. To some degree the change he envisioned of men of brown skin being English in mind and sympathy came to pass. He was lazily Eurocentric and assumed the truth of the evidenceless proposition that everything Occidental was innately superior. It was the sort of civilisational egotism that is common when an empire is mighty. This axiom has been assumed by other hyperpowers. The Chinese, the Indians, the Americans, the Soviets, the Romans, the Greeks and the Arabs have all in their times made this presupposition of their automatic moral, aesthetic and intellectual superiority.

Macaulay’s bland dismissal of Indian erudition is in sharp contrast to the homage paid by a previous generation of Britons to India’s tower scholarly achievements. Many Britons in the 18^th century were bewitched by Indian lore and learning. It was not just Sir William Jones who was engrossed by Hindu epics. Macaulay’s hauteur redounds greatly to his discredit. His pig ignorance of India’s lore and history when making such sweeping statements is galling. In antiquity India had been a far more respectable civilisation than anything in the British Isles.

One of the motives behind the Minute on Education was evangelisation. Macaulay was not so crass as to demand the indoctrination of Indians. But he claimed that any Hindu who was Western educated would not longer be a true believer. It transpired to be a false assumption.

Lord Macaulay said he wanted to create a set of people ‘Indian in blood and colour but English in taste and knowledge.’ To some degree he succeeded.

Only 2% of Indians are Christians. Very few of them were converted by the British. British missionaries were perhaps guilty of too much daintiness compared with the Portuguese. Juxtapose the situation in India to Latin America where the Spanish systematically a destroyed the religion of the indigenes.

Eric Hobsbawm said that nationalism goes hand in hand with schools and universities. As the Raj spread education it was perhaps undoing itself. Hobsbawm’s maxim appears apt in this case. Patently the Raj did not want Indians to be mere drudges. There was no rigid curriculum. There was not indoctrination. By contrast nowadays Indians are force fed a diet of anti-imperialist diatribe. The deglutition of such bile is anti-pedagogical.

Indians were schooled in modern medicine under British tutelage. Soon they had Britons among their clientele.

Some Britons were drawing racialist distinctions at that time. It was unfortunate that the zenith of the British Raj coincided with the growth of pseudoscientific racialism in the USA and Europe. Some of these nostra seeped through to Britishers.

The English language was introduced as the state language in the 1830s. It is half fortuitous that it did not arrive much sooner. Had it been introduced a century earlier it would have had decidedly less literary dignity. Perhaps it would never then have achieved the respect that it holds in India today. English was thereafter used in India by officialdom and between Indian elitists in private contexts for their own convenience.

Notably, English never experienced the esotercisation that Sanskrit did. Sanskrit underwent a transformation into something abstruse precisely because the priestly caste wanted to keep what was sacred a mystery to the masses so that they could be the intermedial class. The incomprehensibility of Sanskrit kept the lower castes in impotent ignorance.

The idiolects and ideographs of English gave it greater flexibility that several major Indian languages. The granularity of the language made it particularly versatile. English’s paucity of syllabaries is of course a defect. The anfractuosities of its perfective mood and aspects make it tricky. English is not orthographically exemplary. This has been a stumbling block to people learning it.

English spread in a rather haphazard manner at first. It took several decades before the Indian upper class embraced it. It remained a thing of petty proportions in India until after 1947. Even if it was wrong to introduce English there has been no effort to reinstate Persian!

Those who fought against the EIC are often presented as wanting independence. But these so-called independence fighters were allies of France. Had they won then India would have fallen under the French aegis. The shrinkage of French power in India meant a concomitant increase in British power. It was a zero-sum game.

The arbitrariness of French absolutism would not have been a better destiny for India. Had France won India then it is unlikely that the French Revolution would have taken place. The reforms that France has experienced since 1789 might have been assemblable by now by piecemeal reform.

The EIC fought numerous battles. Most its men were Indians. It always had Indian states as allies too. These wars such as the Mysore Wars were to some extent internal Indian conflicts. Had the EIC not existed then it is probable that these wars would have been fought anyway. The EIC was able to defeat its foes despite the EIC and its allies being outnumbered at almost every battle. The EIC and the British Army in India did not have military technology that was a generation ahead of their nemeses. The Sikhs – for instance – had the latest military hardware and French instructors.

Not every acquisition of land was voluntary. Some states were conquered by the EIC. But if the other state had aggressed the EIC then the EIC had an arguable case for the annexation of the aggressor state.

In the 19^th century more and more Indian states acceded to the Britannic Raj. There were 585 princely states. The great majority joined the Raj of their own free will. Cooch Behar is an example of a state which applied for admittance to the British Empire. The state was then embraced by the empire.

Membership of the British Raj conferred major advantages on a state. It was part of the strongest defensive alliance around. It would have access to modern technology and markets. The princely state would simply have to agree to conduct foreign relations via the British authorities. They say you do not miss what you never had. These states did not have embassies in China or the United States anyway. Thus, the concession that they made was of something hypothetical.

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 is known to most in India as the First War of National Liberation. Its causes were partly a religious prejudice against pork and beef. It was rumoured that new cartridges were greased with the fat from these beasts. The swine is profane to the Muslim and beeves and kine are totemic for the Hindu. There were other issues. The possibility of being sent overseas riled some sepoys. Soldiers had been told they could no longer wear caste marks on parade. This irked many. Soldiers were made to listen to Christian sermons translated into their vernaculars. The religious sensibilities of the soldiers were affronted. Some were perturbed by the doctrine of lapse. If an Indian prince died without a male heir of his body, then his realm was incorporated into the British Raj proper.

Indian nationalist historians have chosen to play up the political actuation of the mutineers. They suggest that the mutiny was mainly about a desire for independence. It would appear that, short term reasons and religious reasons more important and determinative.

The attribution of causality is problematic. We do not have many written sources from the mutineers. Those who survived the mutiny tended not to write about it. That would be to incriminate themselves.

The Indian Mutiny only affected some of North India. Some of the Bengal Army committed the worst military crime: mutiny. Other men in the Bengal Army stayed loyal. The Bombay Presidency Army and the Madras Presidency Army remained true to their oaths.

The mutiny was so cataclysmic for India that the Mughal Emperor, Shah Bahadur, entered a secret correspondence with the EIC. He wanted to change sides. He saw British victory as being better for India. He was right.

The Sikhs were pro-British. This was decisive in several battles.

The EIC therefore represented all the faiths on the Subcontinent: Buddhist, Sikh, Parsee, Christian, Hindu and Muslim. The mutineers only represented the last two. They engulfed India in internecine warfare. To some degree this was an Indian civil war. Had no Britons been there then some of this fighting would have taken place regardless. Religious sodality was nowhere to be seen among Hindus or Muslims as both religions had plenty of men on both sides.

Indian nationalists would like the Mutiny to have been popular and high minded. The annals suggest otherwise.

The mutineers committed many massacres of civilians. They were often slain in a gruesome manner. Moreover, they killed Indian Christians as well as any white. The mutiny is indistinguishable from a pogrom.

The mutiny was motivated by racism, obscurantism and religious bigotry. The EIC Army represented multiracialism and religious tolerance. It was gallantly battling for the values of the enlightenment.

1857 was not the prefiguring the secular democracy that India later became. The birth pangs of that were only possible once the Indian elite had acquired a greater exposure to Westminster style parliamentarianism. Significantly, the Founding Fathers of the Republic of India were all British educated. They were barristers to a man.

Had India become independent in 1857 the Mughal Empire would not have been able to hold much of it together. There would have been a fragmentary India. India is by no means homogenous! It took a lot of nation building by Britons for India to be a mere two nations in 1947 rather than hundreds. The Partition Massacres are illustrative of what had happened periodically between different castes throughout Indian history. This is not to suggest the Britons are incapable of ethnic or religious violence. They are as history proves. But in India Britons kept inter-ethnic asperities from spilling over into huge scale slaughter. Even then there were several significant outbreaks of inter-communal violence in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the casualty figures were limited by the British to hundreds and not hundreds of thousands such as occurred after British rule terminated in 1947.

The simultaneity of British rule and the industrial revolution in India is not coincidental. Had 1857 succeeded for nationalists, then India would have lagged behind other parts of the globe technologically. As a control group one can simply observe the adjacent nations not so blessed as to have come under the aegis of Britannia. They did not gain the numerous benefactions that India did.

After 1857 the EIC was wound up. It remained extant only for the purpose of trading tea and that incarnation of the EIC too was dissolved in 1874.

In the wake of the Mutiny, Queen Victoria assured her Indian subjects that all positions were open to them too. Yet the British Government did not assume the reproducibility of British institutions in India. They knew that India was not fertile soil for parliamentary government at that time. Parliamentarianism was considered arcane even in Europe in the 1850s.

India had often been attacked by Afghanistan and Iran. By the mid-19^th century India was safe from such depredations. There was some skirmishing along the Durand Line: the border with Afghanistan. The British and their faithful Indian allies launched punitive expeditions deep into Afghanistan. It was very valuable for India to have a stalwart and formidable ally in the shape of the United Kingdom.

By the late 19^th century about 67% of the land area of India was under direct British control. The British had district commissioners ruling areas of land. One such man could be in charge of hundreds of square miles. His entire staff was usually Indian. There was uncoerced cooperation. Indian loyalism is understudied.

There was a certain parallelism between the institutions of British India and the princely states. Functionaries were not horizontally barred. They could shift from one system to the other. Contrary to nationalist myth-making, Indians do not seem to have perceived themselves to have been contaminated by being ruled by whites.

The charge of divide et impera is often laid at the door of the British Raj. This is nonsensical. As this essay adumbrated, it was British rule that united a fragmented India. Britons would not profit by there being internecine warfare among Indians. Indians had fought Indians throughout recorded history. That only came to an end under the British Raj. Once the kindly and benevolent British hand was removed, inter communal warfare recommenced. Far from solving problems, independence was to create them as this recrudescence of massive scale violence demonstrates superabundantly.

Britons are sometimes depicted as stupid vicious and base in Indian nationalist discourse. Of course, sometimes that is true. It is held as axiomatic that imperialists are evil whereas anti-imperialists are not. This is ludicrous and childishly partisan just as the inverse presentation would be. Often the so-called anti-imperialists were just imperialists for a less benign or advanced empire in the shape of the Mughals, France or Japan.

Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1877. She sent her firstborn the Prince of Wales to the Delhi Durbar. There his investiture on behalf of his mother took place in the quondam capital. There the princes did homage When it was Edward VII’s turn for the solemn durbar he did not go in person. He had his younger brother Arthur the Duke of Connaught deputise for him. Hence Connaught Place is in Delhi. The princes and chiefs swore fealty to the king-emperor.

The British Raj opened career opportunities for Indians. Their careers were not horizontally barred. Many went to work and dwell in South Africa, Trinidad and Malaysia to name just a few other British colonies. Indians were therefore colonisers of these land. This phenomenon is much understudied.

No one was ever conscripted into the EIC Army, the Indian Army or the Royal Indian Navy or the police. The princely states also had armies. These princely armies fought for the British Empire.

Armed white men were outnumbered by armed Indians by at least 10 to 1. Had these Indians mutinied or even a significant portion of them done so then it would have spelt finis for the British Raj.

India had been conquered by vast hordes when the Mughals and other dynasties came. This is to be juxtaposed with the largely peaceful acquisition of sovereignty by the British Raj. It relied profoundly on diplomacy and dealmaking.

White Britons were a tiny minority in India. They were always outnumbered by Indians by at least a thousand to one. The British community used to learn Indian languages. No many got their tongues around the polysyllables of Indic languages.

The British Raj was served by many others. Tax collectors, clerks, civil servants, railwaymen and the like all played a role. One Briton said that without so many Indians willingly serving the Raj it would not have lasted three months. An Indian retorted, not three weeks.

To liquidate the Raj, Indians did not need to rebel. All that was needed was non-co-operation. The Non-Cooperation Movement was a flop. If Indian civil servants, telephonists, railwaymen and the like had gone on strike then it would have led to paralysis for the Raj. The army, navy, air force and police force could simply have stopped obeying orders. They did not need to turn their guns on the Britons.

When the Raj took action against insurrectionists it was usually Indian police officers who arrested the miscreant. He was tried before an Indian judge and an Indian jury. He was incarcerated in a prison staffed exclusively by Indians. Often there was not a white face to be seen. The British Raj only functioned because Indians WANTED to serve it because it served India.

As Rudyard Kipling wrote, sent forth the best ye breed. The most expensively educated Britons often took ship for the Subcontinent. Men who had been schooled at Eton, Harrow, Westminster (like Warren Hastings) and Winchester went to administer India. Some of these men had attended Varsity. The apical status of the United Kingdom at this time should not be overlooked. It was a singular privilege to be able to study there in the world’s foremost scientific and technology nation. The USA had not yet supplanted the UK in these regards.

Indians in the UK proved that the idea that Indians were unassimilable was bogus. They could join British society. They were purported British subjects and had all the rights of a white Briton. That is why Dadabhai Naoroji was elected to Parliament in 1892. Not a single non white lived in his constituency. Why does no one mention Lord Liverpool becoming Prime Minister in 1812? He was partially Indian.

The finest educational institutions were open to Indians. From the 1870s Indians attended Eton, Harrow, Cambridge University and Oxford University. Unlike the USA, there was no colour bar. Indians educated in the British Isles enjoyed an exposure to parliamentarianism. Not many doubted the applicability of this practice to their homeland. It was then that the reification of Indian nationalism took place. The British Raj had inadvertently sowed the seeds of its own dissolution. This led ineluctably to the establishment of legislatures along the lines of the Westminster paradigm. The Mother of Parliament bore offspring. It was a fatality that the UK did not share with other metropoles. They did not found parliamentary institutions that turned against them. Pluralism was also a notion that the UK introduced. The shariat state that preceded the Raj was not a valid model on a par with that.

Nehru’s political baptism came in 1906 at the time of the Liberal landslide. Seeing Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman become PM convinced Nehru at a formative age that sweeping change was possible and soon.

Education in the United Kingdom left its mark. Many Britons remarked on Nehru’s gentilesse even when they arrested him. He had never been bumptious at school either.

By the late 19^th century there was almost no dissent though free speech was guaranteed. Indian opinion so far as we can determine was pro-Raj. The long exclusion of Indians from the heaven born of the upper echelons of the Indian Civil Service was a motor force behind Congress. Congress critiqued the Raj but fitfully at first. Its criticism then grew in certitude, fervour and acridness.

The Raj even created the Indian National Congress. No oppressor would ever do this. Congress’s brief was to provide critical analysis. For the first few decades Congress wanted British rule to continue. India had free expression which is why Congress was free to castigate the British authorities.

Congress had some white Britons in it at first. Allan Octavian Hume was one of them. The anglophone Indians were then the crest atop a vast plinth of Indians. Most people were unlettered even in their mother tongue. The Raj believed that the Congress elite could guide the ductile masses.

One of the few things that not even the most vicious Indian ultra-nationalist took exception to was, the English language.  Even some ultra-nationalists were bilingual adepts.

Britain forged Indian national consciousness even if it did so accidentally. Railways, roads, telegraphs, newspapers and the English language united India more so than any political movement.  As Benedict Anderson said, it was the dawn of print-capitalism that expedited the creation of a sense of nation-ness. For the first time Indians could meet people from the far end of the Subcontinent after only three days of travel. For the first time there was a language common to all provinces and faiths albeit it one spoken only by a minute educational elite. Of necessity, it was a language of bilinguals. Anglophone Indians also spoke their local vernaculars. The resurgence of Hindi in political circles in the last 30 years is an interesting phenomenon and to some extent a reaction against globalisation. Notwithstanding that, the English language’s usage has increased exponentially since the end of the Raj. Yet it has still not achieved universality in India. However, Hindi has not superseded it in most spheres of elite life. The fusion of the two languages is a long way off despite English accretions to Hindi. English is still the prestige language. Perhaps that it why Indian English so often sounds stately and snobbish.

It is a curious irony that the genesis of Indian nationalism as we know it was an unintended consequence of British imperialism. The technology, the language and the shared non-whiteness allowed Indians to define themselves. Prior to the 19^th century provincial particularism predominated even among the elite. But from the 1880s there was a collective motion among the anglophone educational aristocracy. It was a tiny segment of the population to begin with.  But it was only when this highly educated anglophone cadre was formed that India achieved quiddity as a political entity.

The fixity of the English language provided a reliable language for the Indian elite to communicate in. Because they learnt is consciously and not at their mother’s knee it was not so protean.

Despite professing democracy, Congress made little effort to induct the illiterate majority into democracy before 1947. They wanted self-rule not majority rule. There was little spurring for independence from farmers.

In the countryside where most Indians dwelt none, but substantial landowners spoke English until well into the 20^th century. Why was English so monopolised? Perhaps because knowledge is power. Some of the baronial classes even reprobated education for the lower orders. There are clear analogies to be drawn between this attitude and say the view of the aristocrats in 19^th century tsarist Russia.

Tellingly, Congress did not repudiate the feudal attitude of the landlords for some time after independence.

The dissemination of maps across India in the late 19^th century as railway timetables spread gave people a mental image of their country. India could therefore be conceived spatially and even temporally but even the illiterate majority.

As Benedict Anderson said it is print, map and museum that formulated modern nationalism. A census was also a key element in this. It categorised people. Prior to the late 19^th century Indianness was not part of the warp and weft of daily life.

Printed Korans and their translations into Indian vernaculars also spread in India in the late 19^th century. This led to a revival of Islamic fervour and puritanism. There had been much backsliding due to the dissipation of the Mughal Court. After 1857 that was all gone. The recrudescence of religious mania is one of the undesirable by-products of British rule. The theomorphising of print though is a fascinating phenomenon. This was no conscious manipulation of British policy.

As we have seen it is the convergence of the communications revolution, the transport revolution and the English language that created a pan-Indian leadership class capable of carrying the baton after 1947. The haute bourgeoise were the ruling class after independence and not the princes. It is hard to imagine that happening without Britannic suzerainty.

One of the fascinating consequences of British rule is that neither Hindus nor Muslims claimed to be the sole state bearing people by the 1940s. Half the Muslims claimed a separate homeland, but they had no wish to rule large numbers of infidels. They did not regard Hindus as assimilable.

An embryonic national leadership for India was formed not in India but in the Inns of Court in London. That is perhaps why India has always at least paid lip service to the rule of law. Curiously, the same cannot be said for Pakistan despite its Founding Fathers having the same background. Pakistan’s foundation is owed to barristers such as M A Jinnah and Chaudhry Rehmat Ali. But since then, the country has been ruled officially or unofficially by a Punjabi Pinochet most of the time.

The English language is one of the things that has prevented the fragmentation of India since 1947. The vernaculars that predated English give rise to an identity and that could well have led to more separatist movements. The politico-cultural eminence of English had the effect and creating a certain solidarity amongst the highly educated.

There has been an attempt to foster Hindi as a national language in recent decades. This has borne fruit. However, the elite appears to be irremediably anglophone.

In the 1950s there were proto-national impulses, to put it mildly, behind the campaign for the States Reorganisation Act. Had it not been for the elite being united by English it is probable that a more serious attempt at secession would have been made.

The trans-Indian intelligentsia’s exposure to British notions of parliamentarianism filled them with admiration. They wished to bring home this British export. It was an idea on which the Raj was distinctly cool. English remained a language of power. Congress was still obliged to address the masses in local languages long after independence. It finds it expedient to do so even today.

The Congress Party was soon to start a battle for men’s minds. They were not able to penetrate the countryside very much.

Capitalism was we know it entered India with the British Raj. Indians had always traded. But the British banking system linked India to world money markets. An Indian schroff did not have to rely on a system of codewords any longer. Joint stock companies revolutionised Indian commerce.

At the maximum extent of the Raj there were only 40 000 British soldiers in India. The population of India was then over 250 000 000. The British military presence was minute. That was because India was not occupied. Force was not needed to control India. There as the pro-British Indian Army which had 250 000 men. This taken together with the British Army in India still meant that India had very few soldiers in it. The princely states also had small armies. If the Indian Army or the princely states armies had mutinied, they would have defeated the British Raj extremely easily. India was far less militarised under the Raj than it is today. The British troops in India and their Indian comrades were mostly deployed on the North-West Frontier. They were defending India from the ancestors of the Taliban. As the frontier was replete with soldiery, the plains of India were all but devoid of soldiers. Huge swathes of the country were unguarded since people were content. There was no insurrectionary threat for decades. Nationalists wish to pretend that there were fervent rebels in India in the late 19^th century but that is bogus. The Pathans on the Frontier were fighting over local and even tribal issues. They were no friends of the Hindus of the plains or even the Muslims of the plains.

Because of the British Army and the British trained, equipped and officered Indian Army there were no more incursions by Afghanistan or Burma. People could go about their lawful business secure.

The security apparatus was of the British Raj was tiny. There was a miniscule Intelligence Bureau to keeps tabs on terrorists and troublemakers. Congress, the Muslim League and other organisations were honeycombed with informers. Perhaps we shall never know which famous Indian nationalists were actually double agents.

There was patently no siege mentality on the part of Britons in India. They were so vulnerable, but no one attacked a serious number of them. The unenforceability of British authority without huge scale India support was blindingly obvious.

The British Raj also saw the spread of humanism and rationalism. India had had no Enlightenment prior to that. Admittedly there had been Mughal Emperors who were ecumenical but that is different.

Some Britons in India in the last 20 years of the Raj knew precious little of the local lingo. Some spoke not Hindi but dog Hindi. This was commented on by numerous Indians. The Raj was past its heyday. Maybe that was why antipathy towards the Raj grew.

There has been Christians in India since Antiquity. The Assyrian Church was indifferent to the British Raj. This was a matter of some disappointment to the latter.

In the 1920s Congress decided to embarrass the British into granting autonomy. An evil power could not be embarrassed. Congress recognised British decency in believing that Britons could be embarrassed. Congress believe that armed force was not needed to bring about the granting of independence. Until 1930. Congress did not even want independence. It only wanted dominion status within the British Empire. But there were elements that were bolshier.

Congress became more militant as the Soviet Union became mightier. The simultaneity of the two events is not coincidental. Congress realised that the British Empire faced an existential threat. Congress had a potential ally in the shape of this totalitarian force. Congress did not seek to establish a totalitarian society. There were Indian communists who travelled to the USSR and embraced the Stalinist system with fervour and with relish. They returned to India preaching red revolution. These agitators became a menace to the Raj.

The Delhi Durbars proved that British rule was with the express consent of the governed. All Indian princes did homage to the Empress of India who was represented by her son the Prince of Wales. The same was true of the subsequent durbars.

In time there were legislative assemblies. These conferred legitimacy on the Raj. Elected public representatives approved of the Raj and swore fealty thereto. These bodies were elected only by affluent men. Only 20% of Indians could read at the time. Literacy and wealth were largely the same thing.

The Chamber of Princes in the 1920s and 1930s was another legislative body which demonstrated that the Raj was legitimate. The chamber was unelected. It was like the House of Lords. The hereditary principle was accepted in India. In India today family is still everything.

By the 1920s there was unrest. Some Indian wanted independence. A few had wanted it before the First World War. There were terrorist attacks in the 1920s. However, their number was miniscule. In a country as enormous as India the scale of terrorism was trifling. This proves that people were content.

There were protests and hartlals in the 1920s and 1930s. However, these were in a few major cities. Most people lived in the countryside. They were unaffected. There has been far too much focus on a few urban troublemakers. The generality of Indians was quiescent and accepted the Raj.

In the 1920s and 1930s the economy stagnated. That came as the population was starting to grow rapidly. Improved food supply and medicine had got mortality down. The combination of economic stagnation and a bulging population was unrest. Therefore, the discontent in the 20s and 30s was due to these factors more than the British Raj per se. An independent India would also have had to cope with public anger in such a situation.

Subhas Chandra Bose articulated a ferocious indictment of British rule. However, even Netaji found something to admire on the British dominion in India. He concurred that India was not ripe for democracy. One of this Cambridge graduate’s notable characteristics was to speak English. Not to do so would have been to give his movement and anachronistic gloss. He was sceptical of the political wisdom of the Indian masses. He felt the priestly caste was apt to inculcate superstitions into the unlettered peasantry. They could easily be led astray. Therefore, he called for the smack of firm government. Though he was no overfond of the Raj he noted the efficacy and incorruptibility of the Indian Civil Service.

By the 1940s it appeared that most Indians wanted independence. We cannot know since there were no surveys. There were elections but only about 20% of males could vote. We do not know if their views were representative of the populace as a whole.

In 1942 the British Government announced that independence would come within two years of the end of war.

In 1947 George VI, Emperor of India, announced that the UK was granting sovereign independence to India. His titulature changed to King of India.

His Majesty’s vassals in the Subcontinent were the 585 princely states. Some of these opted for Pakistan. Some of them had acquired their titles and states through hucksterings as the Mughal Empire had slowly fallen apart.

The British Empire suffered elephantiasis from 1918 onwards. Imperial overstretch enfeebled it.

Because India has no common language and in 1947 even the most widely spoken language – Hindi – was spoken by no more than 20% of the populace there was no philological-lexicographical movement to affect the masses. This is markedly dissimilar from what transpired in European nationalism. That is why in India the British manufactured state was crucial in establishing India as a single entity. The necessity of a unified language for the ruling class was provided by the British. That is why Congress was a genuinely all India movement. India has involved its own idiolect of English.

It was a paroxysm of religious mania cum nationalism that prevented India from remaining united in 1947. But India in its current borders is now an ineradicable force.

The Britons in India did not really become a creole community. The identification with their ancestral homeland even after several generations in India was what differentiated them from creole communities elsewhere. The Anglo-Indians – those of mixed blood – arguably did become one. This is perhaps derivable from the notion that only those of fully white stock were true Britons.

India has left an indelible print on the British Isles. Indian and British culture are to some degree interwoven. Indianisms are unselfconsciously uttered by Britons who have no ancestral link to South Asia. There are many Britons of South Asian ancestry who cannot locate themselves entirely in one culture or other but in a happy melange of the twain.

It is tristful to reflect that most Britons remain incorrigibly ignorant of South Asian affairs. However, the notion that the word India conjures up only images of snake charmers is bogus.

THE RAJ WAS GOOD FOR INDIA

In extolling the manifold virtues and accomplishments of the British Raj I can only pronounce it magnificent. Even some quibble with this summation I must reply in the words of Warren Hastings, ‘I stand astounded at my own moderation.’

India owes its unity to the Raj. This might seem counterintuitive. What about Partition? Partition came at the call of a segment of the Indian population. That is to say most of the 25% of population who inhabited what became Pak and Bangladesh. Congress agreed to Partition. The Parliament of India voted in favour. Partition was an Indian idea. London fiercely opposed it. Stafford Cripps, Lord Mountbatten and other tried might and main to forfend it.

Why is Indian one country and not hundreds? That is because of the Raj piecing it together. India has been united, divided, reunited and redivided several times in its very long history.

At times India excluded certain states that are not part of it. At times it included some of Afghanistan. India also holds land that once pertained to Nepal.

India owes its existence to its conquest of other states. No sovereign state has had a parthenogenesis. India is unexceptional in this respect. The prefatory lineage of India blurs into myth perhaps five millennia ago. But if conquest delegitimises the Raj, then it must befall that it delegitimises independent India to. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  The pretended delegitimisation of either state on the ground of having annexed and incorporated other states is equally fatuous.

India claims its borders based on British era maps and treaties. Therefore, the Raj’s legacy cannot be all bad. The Republic of India explicitly argues it is a successor state of the Raj and must be allowed the advantages of British era treaties. Were it not for that, then China could claim even more land than it already does. India now includes some territory taken from Nepal by the EIC. If India wishes to disavow its British heritage as unmitigatedly wicked, then it ought to affect the retrocession of such territory to the Nepalis forthwith.

It was technology, trade, the military, the police, and the administration that knitted India together. The Mughal Empire did not govern the whole of modern India. Admittedly, it governed some zones that are no longer Indian.

Each region or state of India had its own peculiarities. India is now 28 states. Many of these would qualify as large countries if independent. Many are analogous to sovereign states in that they are based around distinct language and culture and have a tradition of independence.

Nationalism is about particularism. It is hard to see what Indians have in common beyond their British heritage. British influence was mostly about the public sphere. Indians usually did not adopt British clothing, cuisine or mannerisms. Cricket and tea are two of the unofficial aspects of British life that caught on in India. Admittedly, tea was an import from China.

Tea drinking caused a population explosion. So many people in the UK and India died in the 17^th century from drinking foul water. Boiling it made it safe to drink. There were health giving properties of tea too.

The British Raj also helped to forge Indian nationhood by introducing the fourth dimension: times. Of course, Indians had a concept of time afore that. India has several calendric systems. But the British introduction of timepieces and timetables made time a universal concept: something that could be measured with precision. To many Hindus, life was something omnitemporal because they believed in reincarnation.

India had little sense of horizontal nationality in the 19^th century. People could identify with their social superiors and inferiors who shared their language, culture and faith. India is the most heterogenous country in the world. It is a miracle that it is united at all. It is not all that dreadful that 20% of India’s land seceded in 1947. It is astonishing that as much as 80% of the Raj remained in one piece. Many bewail Partition, as do I. But it could easily have been far, far worse.

It is lugubrious and regrettable that caste prejudice has not disappeared yet in India. Caste discrimination by law still exists in India. But the upliftment of the downtrodden castes was not attempted until the British epoch. With the advent of the railways, castes could not be physically separated any longer. This was the very genesis of sociological solidity. It has grown only very slowly.

Some ill-fated Hindu reformers call for the abolishment of caste discrimination under British rule. They did not get far. The lesson that the Raj learnt from 1857 was to tread very carefully on religious matters. This was a sensitive issue and the British authorities thought is sagacious to allow the Hindu authorities to resolve this issue for themselves.

India has been able to resist the absolutizing tendences of certain political factions thus far. That is partly attributable to the Raj. Those who demagogically call for a confessional state or communism have been resisted.

As we have seen Indian society is by no means a replication of British society. The Indian State is not exactly and analogue of the UK State either. A fascinating question is not asked often enough. How did Britain learn from India? The British Raj was educative on both sides.

Britain gained shampoo, zero, pyjamas, polo, chess, the word bungalow and much more. Some of this came via intermediaries such as the Ishmaelites.

When India moved towards independence Churchill, Clement Attlee, Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Wavell, Leo Amery and Lord Mountbatten all agreed that India should be one. That is why they tried their uttermost to talk the Muslim League out of the Pakistan demand. But sometimes the struggle nought availeth. At least Mountbatten was able to dissuade almost every princely state from seeking independence. That is why the UK bequeathed its legacy to only two states on the Subcontinent and not 587.  That is to say India, Pakistan and 585 princely states. Whatever the frailties of the British Raj it did favour Indian unity.

Some Indians have said that Partition was the final insult. But Partition was voted for by Congress. London emphatically did not want Partition.

It is much more mundane to accept the truth than to believe a conspiracy theory. What did the UK gain from Partition? Enmity?

It is true that some of the institutions created by Britons in India might have subsequently been created by Indians off their own bat. Furthermore, some of the infrastructure constructed under Britannic superintendence might have been developed by Indians even if no Briton had ever set foot on India’s shore. However, it is unlikely that much of this would have been accomplished by 1947. Look at the trajectory India was on in the 18^th century? Look at some of her neighbours as a control group? Bhutan, Afghanistan and Nepal remain far less developed. You may say this is because they are mountainous and landlocked. But this also gave them the advantage of being almost impregnable and therefore better able to concentrate on development as their military security was all but guaranteed.

Dadabhai Naoroji wrote ‘The Drain: un-British rule in India.’ He noted that wealth flowed from India to the UK. Even ‘the old man of India’ as he was known illuminatingly acknowledged that India was morally and materially indebted to the United Kingdom. The British had been pacificators and builders of India. The costs of doing so were defrayed by India paying the salaries of those who assisted them. Intra-hemispheric trade blossomed under British rule. That was beneficial. Mutuality of benefit it a hard concept to get across to Marxists as many Indian nationalists were.

The Suez Canal allowed British trade to reach the West more speedily. Had it not been in British hands it might have been closed to Indian traffic. An overland trek would not be a good way to expedite flourishing commerce. The Cape of Good Hope route was too long.

That the Republic India remained united since 1947 and did not fragment is a testament to the mettle of the institutions founded by the Raj. That the second largest population in the world has managed to remain united despite is bewildering diversity is in part due to the British Raj. It goes without saying that since 1947 most of the credit for managing to preserve the oneness of India is down to the Indians themselves.

Indian nationalist discourse’s presupposition that India was entitled to secession from the empire bites back. If India had the right to secede from a large unit do India’s constituent states not have the same right?

Why would so many Indians have willingly given up their lives to serve the Raj. They were not so naïve as to participate in a scheme if it were defrauding them.

THE RAJ WAS BETTER THAN WHAT PRECEDED AND SUCCEEDED IT

We are often told that India had democracy long before the UK. That is true of parts of India in the very distant past. But this soon fell prey to the absolutizing tendencies of rulers after Ashoka.

Prior to the EIC there were only dynastic states. The lineages of these were often intertangled. But after the EIC and the British Raj established India is became a rational-legal state even though it had a monarch. The rechtstaat in India continues to this day. That is why unlike many countries in Asia, India has the rule of law. Arbitrary government reigns in many other lands.

Previous Indian polities had come into existence by elbowing others aside. They did not establish parliamentary institutions when they supplanted other regimes. They had no mission for the betterment of their subjects. This stands in stark contrast to the British Raj’s avowed purpose after 1857.

After 1947 the borders drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe and his predecessors were the taken for granted frame of reference. That is an accomplishment of the Raj. India’s unity within that was seen to be self-evident. Almost all people there had achieved full absorption within the Indian State.

India had been ruled by foreigners for centuries before the first Briton sighted India. The Mughals and before them the Lodhi dynasty were invaders and conquerors. They spoke a foreign tongue. They were an alien faith to most Indians. Britons were hardly much more foreign than the Mughals or the Lodhis.

The Mughal Empire was a dynastic state. Delhi was an incredible metropole. But the locus of power shifted to Agra, to Lahore, to Fatehpur Sikri and back to Delhi a few times. That signifies the chaotic nature of the empire. The provinces were held in vassalage. The subjects were the merest chattel. They had no rights. The traffic on humans were considered honourable. The state was not systematised.

The Mughals did not regard primogeniture as a requisite principle. This had the benefit of mostly able rulers coming to the Peacock Throne. This dynastic Darwinism meant there was survival of the fittest. It was literally survival since the Mughals sometimes practised fratricide like their Ottoman co-religionists. So much for Islam promoting family values! The lack of an established line of succession meant regular free for-alls. The periodicity of these power struggles enfeebled the empire. An unedifying scramble for the throne also meant that bribery became engrained in the system as princelings would offer douceurs to praetorians and the vizier. The Mughal Empire was necessarily erratic due to the inherent instability of its succession. A smooth transference of power was the exception not the norm. Inter-monarchic approval played no role in conferring legitimacy on the Mughals.

The Mughal Empire gradually withered. It was falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions as Marx might have said. An assertively Islamic regime, it failed to convert most of its subjects to its faith. Its legitimacy was grounded on right of conquest, but it could not defend its borders. It was not even ambling towards progress in any sphere when it went into terminal decline in the early 18^th century. It lost its clout when it lost its knout.

Even today the Islamic Republic of Pakistan casts its mind back to the Mughals. It lays claim to being a lineal descendant of the Mughal State. General Muhammad Zia ul Haq said he wished to be a latter-day Aurangzeb: a true soldier of Islam. That is why he saw Hindus as idolaters. Pakistan which spent relatively little time under British tutelage did not have sufficient time for parliamentary institutions to bed down. Hence the unacceptance of pluralism. This is a cause of infelicity for Pakistanis even if they do not recognise it.

By stark contrast the British Raj at its apex in 1914 showed little sign of trouble. It was durable. Had it not been for Britain’s fatal decision to fight a superpower in 1914 and against in 1939 there is every reason for the supposition that the Raj would have lasted decades or even centuries longer. It was not running out of steam. It was the cost and the casualties of these wars that enfeebled the Raj. Moreover, Britain’s foes assisted the anti-British forces in India.

By the mid-20^th century European colonialism was said to have reach obsolescence. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is paradoxical that by Britain introducing parliamentarianism to India, Britain was sowing the seeds of the Raj’s downfall. But parliamentary governance was not what Britain’s deadliest enemies such as Subhas Chandra Bose envisioned for an independent India.

It is a truism that history is an endless chain of cause and effect. That is why counterfactual history is often imponderable. One can never but sure what would have happened but for British rule. But we shall try to conjecture.

In 18^th century Britain there were already some egalitarian movements. These had no analogue in India. The Indian intelligentsia was not interested in the issue.

The Raj was to burst in twain the galling yoke of thraldom. But the Raj gets no credit for this. Untouchability was only undermined by the Raj.

Britons had no technological advantage when they arrived in India. Technology was only ambling forward.

In 19^th century there was no movement to abolish slavery until the British introduced it. There was no movement for the emancipation of women. Suttee (widow burning) was condemned by only a handful of Hindu reformers. It is true that most widows were not burnt. However, there were still at least several thousand women who were burnt alive each year in early 19^th century India. There is no reason to suppose that any of these abuses would have been ended in the 19^th century without beneficent British rules. In all likelihood, these barbarities would have continued well into the 20^th century. The British reintroduced human rights to India. Emperor Ashoka invented human rights many centuries earlier. But his humane rulings were soon effaced.

By the late 19^th century, the United Kingdom was in many respects the world model. Liberals and reformers the world over, looked to it for inspiration. Its parliamentarianism was envied by many. The UK was also a world leader in industry and science until outpaced by the United States in the 1870s.

We are often told that the British committed genocide in India. It takes some chutzpah when the population increased so markedly under British dominion. As Churchill said whilst American Indians saw their numbers shrink to a fraction of what they had been before the pale face landed in America, the Indians pullulated alarmingly. Indian tenderly multiplied under beneficent British rule. Suffice it to note that a population cannot possibly grow under genocide. Such a flagrantly false claim by Indian nationalists gravely impugns their honesty. They cannot be given the doubt when they make statements that are unfalsifiable.

Britannic inventions perhaps unwittingly undermined the caste system. Aboard a train the castes could not be kept apart. Of course, a dalit’s shadow could fall upon the Brahmin. To be fair, some members of the priestly caste wanted this pernicious system of caste discrimination done away with in the 19^th century.

There was at first a subtle shift in caste relations. The caste system has not disappeared even now. But its death knell was sounded under British rule. Castes are antique but lugubriously they are not anachronistic in India.

India did not have the solidity of a single community under the British epoch. The English languages was a mode of communication which led to a meeting of minds between Indians of all regions. Indeed, it was a language for the educational aristos. By 1947 no more than 5% of Indians spoke English even to a low level. The crucial thing about the English tongue is that it is neutral between the states. In 1947 at most 20% of people spoke Hindi including those who spoke it badly. The Hindi speakers were all in north central India. Although English had fewer speakers the vital thing is that they were the elite and were scattered all across the country. That helped to forge links and a sense of togetherness. The language was equally alien to all. Therefore, no one was privileged by his language being chosen and no one was disrespected by his language being disregarded.

The English language was perhaps to lead to the unravelling of the very Raj that introduced the language. Congress leaders communicated almost exclusively in the language of the imperial metropole. This gave them sociological solidity. It was an incalculable gift to a very heterogenous people.

By speaking English in the decades after the dissolution of the Raj, an Indian would situate himself among the elite. Yet the time has come when the language is so widely comprehended that it no longer signifies the elite states that it once did.

Many a ferocious indictment of British perfidy was penned in English. The oracy of Nehru was notable for his pukka pronunciation.

India was bewitched by the fake fakir in the shape of M K Gandhi. This fraud announced many a ‘fast unto death’. It never ended in his death. He was a for war before he was a pacifist before he was for war before he was a pacifist again. His putative naivete about the Japanese shows that he cannot be taken seriously as a political thinker. Someone as sophisticated as him cannot have believed that ‘lathi play and the like’ would have stopped the Nipponese war machine. Was it sheer caprice that led him to propose even that? Was there no linkage between his saying British rule was ‘satanic’ and his willingness to let his people fall to one of the cruellest empires in history? Here was a man who urged the UK to surrender to Hitler even when the war was going well. Hitler incidentally had urged Lord Halifax to shoot Gandhi.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s behaviour towards his nieces was suspect to say the least. His walk sticks, as he called them, appear to have been subject to molestation. But he is on a pedestal. For some Indians, he can never be criticised.

His antediluvian attitude to science was plain daft. He was against Western medicine because it made men ‘effeminate’ and used spirituous liquor. That was often alcohol to clean skin before an injection. He was also against life-saving injections as violence. Happily, India had spurned the absurd jabbering of this Luddite loony. Ruefully, almost all writing on Gandhi is hagiographic in nature. It is high time that he was scrutinised with detachment. He needs to be de-canonised. Gandhi was not all bad. The ill-fated Gandhi was going to a prayer meeting to offer up his orisons for reconciliation with Pakistan when he was gunned down by a Hindu zealot Narayan Apte and Nathuram Godse. When M K Gandhi was smitten by bullets India was plunged into grief and gnashing of teeth. The bewailing his death was genuine.

The trope about Gandhi’s humanitarianism is not entirely to be believed. As I noted earlier, he did much to immiserate his people.

Happily, India has spurned Gandhi’s daft preachments. The country has not returned to a pre-industrial age. It does not follow his pacifist naivete. The people are more decorously attired than bapuji would have them.

India has since produced many a masterpiece of English language novels. The grandeur, hauteur and sonority of upper class Indo-English accents are a rare treat for me.

In teeming slums many would die of treatable illnesses because they believed Gandhi’s preachments against medicines. He has much to answer for.

The Gujarati barrister’s scribbling is far from engrossing. I do not recommend his book My Experiments with the truth. As well as being disingenuous he was also a bore.

Mohandas Karamchand was unsparing of his own nation. He noted that India was to a considerable extent peopled by bigots. He deprecated the noisome racialism that some whites felt towards Indians. However, he said that was trifling compared to the monstrous mistreatment which some upper caste people inflicted on the Dalits (untouchables). The profundity of his observation is not pondered enough. He called the untouchables by the name of harijans – children of god. Many held that Dalits were to be only hewers of wood and drawers of water. They were to be kept subordinate. They were clubbed insentient for centuries such that some became servile. The lumpenproletariat there had gained nothing from pre–British India. Being a Dalit was not a hindrance to seeking British employment.

There were always people who would inculcate superstitions into the masses in every country. In India rationalists began to debunk conmen in the British era. Unfortunately, India is still plagued by these faith fraudsters. But it was the introduction of modern science that set India on the path to stopping these tricksters from fleecing the gullible. Yes, India had been scientifically ahead centuries earlier. But by the 18^th century it was far behind the United Kingdom.

The pre-British Indian State was founded by conquest as almost all states are. People all over India did not suddenly one day in ancient times decided to be Indian and to be united. A magnate in one part of the country started to subdue the others. ‘Twas ever thus. North Central India was the locus of power. It is the most fertile zone in India. The Gangetic Plain was the fulcrum of Indian History. Whoever held this plain, held India. It took a mighty army to do so because the area is so flat that it is hard to defend. That is why the capitals of India have always been in this zone. Delhi, Agra and Fatehpur Sikri are there. The holiest sites in Hinduism and in Sikhism are in North Central India: Varanasi (Benares), Amritsar and others.

India was itself an empire. How did it come to rule some of Afghanistan? A claim of national sovereignty cannot be asserted by those who have deprived others of the same.

Shashi Tharoor states that the British Raj was illegitimate since it had mutineers blown to kingdom come from the mouths of canon. Capital punishment was uncontroversial in 1857. It was universally practised. Execution by this method was humane in that death was instantaneous. The mutineers suffered less than British criminals who suffered the short drop method of hanging which caused death by slow asphyxiation. All executions worldwide were in public back then. Blowing people from canon had the virtue of being an effectual deterrent since it was so dramatic. Slower and more gruesome methods of execution were employed by pre-British Indian states. But if the death penalty de-legitimises a state, then pre-British India was also illegitimate according to Tharoor. By his rationale independent India is also illegitimate since it still has capital punishment. His own Congress Party retained the death penalty. The United Kingdom abolished capital punishment over half a century ago. Therefore, judging by Tharoor’s own rationale the UK is legitimate. Ergo as the UK is legitimate and post-British India is not, then the former should rule the latter.

Dr Tharoor’s unhealthy fixation with execution is also an example of trying to make an image an argument. It is the formal logical fallacy of an appeal to emotion. This is contemptible. Were we to conjure up images of terrorists executed by India would that make the cause of India’s foes into a righteous one? Of course, it would not.

Dr Tharoor is overfond of vehemently vituperating the British Raj. Each Brit bashing broadside he delivers wins him another 10 000 votes. The incorrigibly ignorant fall for such demagoguery.

The dissolution of the Raj was accompanied by massive scale bloodletting. The Punjab was turned into a hecatomb. The hundreds of thousands of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were murdered were victims of anti-imperialism. Not one of these people slain in Partition was slain by a Briton.

Sir Winston Churchill foresaw that the independence of India would lead to massive scale religious violence and caste discrimination. He forewarned the people of India. He was a Cassandra. Once the calamity befell India he did not say, ‘I told you so.’

If India was so profitable for the UK it is odd that UK let it go. After the Second World War the UK had more need of money than ever. The British could have stamped out the independence movement in the 1930s totally. Congress was briefly banned. But why not ban it permanently? Its leaders were not killed. The British right of free expression and the right to protests were respected in India except when the public order made it exigent to hold these rights in abeyance.

Maintaining India was costly for the UK. The Conservative PM Disraeli had said the empire was ‘a millstone around our neck.’ Imperialism was not liked by everyone in the UK even at the height of the empire.

By the time that His Britannic Majesty granted independence to his Indian realm it was 1947. The British authorities had believed India was unready for democracy. Only around 20% of men were permitted to vote. The Dominion of India instantly gave the vote to all men and women.

Democracy takes a long time to evolve. People need decades or even centuries to learnt is intricacies.

You might say democracy works well in India. Corruption has often been endemic. Significant cheating has also been a serious problem at certain times and in particular places. This militates against the argument that India was in a ripe state for democracy in 1947. Back then only 20% of Indians could read. This figure was higher among males than females. The argument against universal suffrage was that illiterates cannot access and comprehend information. An uninformed choice is no choice at all.

Forget not that until 1947 India included Pakistan and Bangladesh. Pakistan has been under military dictatorships for much of its history. The rest of the time its intelligence agency the ISI has rigged elections. Bangladesh has also had coups and a military junta ruling it. Had these countries remained within India then perhaps democracy in India would not have survived.

It is true that some parts of India had had forms of democracy in the very distant past. But these had withered or been extirpated centuries before the advent of Britannic rule. These democracies were village panchayats. It is misleading to suggest that this was tantamount to the Westminster system that India has today. The early Indian democracies were not analogous to parliamentarianism. Indeed, in the early 19^th century the UK was emphatically not a democracy. It had parliamentary government but that was different to democracy at the time. In Britain only a burgher or owner of substantial realty was permitted to vote until 1832.

Indian troops murdered tens of thousands of civilians in India just after independence. You don’t believe me? Believe the Government of India then. The Government of India wrote a report on Operation Polo which was when India deprived the State of Hyderabad of its lawful independence. India launched a war of aggression against a sovereign state. Perhaps you think that Hyderabad should have become part of India. But the issue might have been resolved with spilling a single drop of blood. The government’s report on the massacres was so toxic that it was hidden for 65 years. Judging by independent India’s own standards the British Raj was more humane. This demolishes the core myth of Indian nationalism: that the Raj was brutal; and that independent India was not.

How is it that one massacre – Jallianwala Bagh – condemns the Raj to perpetual obloquy but numerous larger scale massacres do not do likewise for independent India? The ethical elasticity of Indian nationalist discourse must be impressive. How do these moral gymnasts explain that? The infantilism and vacuity of this ideology does it no credit. This essayist feels much scorn for it.

Was Jallianwala Bagh evil? Yes, it certainly was. That does not mean that many more crimes by independent India can be effaced.

At any time, India is battling to contain several insurgencies. This suggests that Indian unity is not as popular as Indian nationalists would have us believe. The Indian Army has been engaged in a counterinsurgency in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989. The army has deliberately killed several thousand civilians there. No army is perfect. Every army contains a few headcases. India has prosecuted some of those accused of such crimes. But many soldiers and police officers have got off scot free for murder. Yet again, the notion that post-British India is more moral than British India is proved to be a grotesque inversion of the truth.

India is arguably a concatenation of hundreds of nationalities. Each has its own particularities and peculiarities. The collective individuality of each community cannot be realised in such a gigantic state. Unsurprisingly some seek self-assertion through independence. Claiming that India has ‘always’ been a nation is one of the frailties of Indian nationalism. At least British nationalism does not have the debility that obliges it to pretend that the United Kingdom is especially ancient.

The mundanities that bind India together are often state agencies. These owe their life to the erstwhile Britannic administration. Indians may say that all Indians share an allegiance to Dr Ambedkar’s constitution. Where did he get the idea of a codified constitution? He studied in the UK.

India is by no means a replication of the United Kingdom. The British did not think that the UK could or should graft everything about itself onto the Subcontinent. Some nostra are not for export. As there was no equivalencing the two countries, it was patent that not all British institutions were applicable in India. Bigamy was never outlawed in Hindustan, for instance.

The centrifugal forces in India underscore another point. This vast polyethnic, polyglot and multireligious subcontinent only achieved even a semblance of nation-ness due to the British. The dynastic states that preceded Britannic dominion were hardly national in basis. They too were often polyethnic and multilingual. How India came to be united is an endless chain of cause and effect that is too long to be limned herein.

Having the British as a common foe allowed Indian nationalists to identify with each other. This formed a bond of comradeship. This is ironic as this is one service that Britons definitely did not wish to perform. Indians could define themselves as not being something else, the Other.

Nationalism has many manifestations. But India is unique in that it such an extraordinarily diverse nation can remain together. India did not appear to have a built-in capacity for nationhood. There was relatively little that united people. 80% of Indians are Hindus: that is as close as it gets. But Islam is not enough to unite most Muslims or even to keep East and West Pakistan together. Hinduism does not unite Nepal and India in a polity. Nehruvian secularism has forfended India making Hinduism the explicit core of identity but under Narendra Modi that might be changing.

Under the Raj civil liberties were sometimes suspended in extremis. The Republic of India, in its wisdom, has seen fit to do likewise. It has oft invoked British era legislation. President’s rule has been imposed on disorderly states. States have suspended civil liberties severally. If such measures when exigent were permissible for post 1947 India, then they must have been permissible in pre 1947 India too. Upholding order is no vice. India has not officially resorted to draconian measures. But unofficially it has engaged in large scale extrajudicial slayings of militants.

This essay does not suggest that the Government of India was also wrong to proclaim a state of emergency. President’s rule in certain states with the state legislature held in suspended animation was sometimes an apposite and proportionate response to grave public peril. As New Delhi has so often felt compelled to avail itself of colonial era statutes in such situations these statutes cannot be considered a malediction.

In Pakistan the constitution is more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Even then the Islamic Republic has often had lengthy periods of martial law. In war laws fall silent: Pakistan has been more or less in a state of war in the Khyber Pukhtunwala for decades. That is why Pakistani law has so often been held in abeyance. The Government of Pakistan has usually held itself absolved of obeying its own laws even in times of tranquility.

Many expressions of views are called seditious now. Opining can be perilous. All this suggests a certain thinness to civil liberty in India. Convoluted argumenta in favour of these laws are meritless.

Indian magnates oftentimes oppressed people before the British came. It is dubious that the British were worse. There are twists and turns in the history of every people. But it is hard to see how India would have evolved the institutions that it has today independently.

ADMITTING WRONGDOING

It is not the task of this piece of trash the reputation of the British Raj. Countless books, monographs and articles do that acerbically. However, it is apt to mention in passing some of the wrongful acts by the British Raj.

It would be infantile and naïve to assume that no one from one’s homeland has ever wronged a foreigner. It would be equally foolish to assume that one’s nation was forever in the wrong. A simple reading of history reveals that Ireland and Great Britain have sometimes been immoral in their dealings with other nation states. Since 1921 the major portion of Ireland left the UK. Nevertheless, Irishmen (including from the South) continued to serve the Raj until the hour of its dissolution.

It is the very beginning of maturity to cast a critical eye at one’s own people. That is however you define people. That could be by ethnicity, colour, faith, nationality or party. Stephen Decatur said ‘Our country, in her intercourse with other nations may she always be in the right, but our country. Right or wrong!’. This closed minded and chauvinistic attitude is to be deprecated. I have always fought against that mindset. The same cannot be said of Indian nationalists or nationalists of any stripe. A person must get beyond his or her emotional attachment to one’s own.

I strive for objectivity. Because of sentimentality towards the British Isles there is a risk that I shall underplay the horrors of the British Raj and overstate its accomplishments and virtues. I am not so childish or naïve to assumed that Ireland and Great Britain must automatically be on the right side of any dispute. The very beginning of maturity is to strive to be unemotional when making judgments about political and historical matters. Closed minded nationalism is as foolish as closed-minded anti-patriotism. For some Britons their greatest pride is their shame. They laud themselves for lacerating their country’s record. They think it makes them clever and broad-minded to demonise their nation’s past excessively.

Chauvinism is a pathology that leads to unspeakable crimes. Therefore, a useful corrective is to try to criticise one’s nation. But the very reverse of chauvinism can be just as bad.

Many of the negative aspects of the Raj are expatiated on by anti-Raj populists such as Tharoor. Can the devil speak true? Yes, he can occasionally. Not every word that the doctor writes is specious.

There was a dark side to the British Raj. I candidly acknowledge the wickedry of some Britons in certain times and in certain places. Millions of Britons and Indians served the Raj in 1947. Many millions more served it throughout its long romantic history. Amongst such an enormous number of people there was bound to be bounders.

The Ilbert Bill was withdrawn owing to the vociferation of many whites in India against it. The bill would have allowed whites to be tried by mixed race juries. Many whites resident in the Subcontinent suspected that Indians would relish sending a white down for a crime he had not committed. Nevertheless, the bill should have been allowed to pass.

The Jallianwala Bagh Atrocity is the most blatant example of evil in the British Raj. This was a shameful act. This act of gross violence did more to terminate the British Raj than any Congress protest. It is hard to feel human sympathy for Sir Michael O’Dwyer when he was assassinated because of his utter impenitence about the massacre. His post-factum apologia for this wholly unnecessary and egregious act of premeditated slaughter superadded insult to injury. It is painful to acknowledge that O’Dwyer was not just a Briton, he was an Irishman.

Brigadier General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer was the one who ordered his troops to fire into the crowd at Amritsar. His Balochis and Gurkhas obeyed the command. When I have observed that at Amritsar, Indians killed Indians this has not played well with an Indian audience. Some said that the Gurkhas were Nepali. That is true but some Gurkhas were recruited form the Nepali community of India.

Dyer unwittingly did more for the Indian independence movement than the Congress Party. Dyer so wrecked Indian faith in British justice that the Raj was probably doomed from the moment he ordered the Indian Army to open fire in Indian civilians.

The 347 years of British involvement in India are so often judged by its worst 10 minutes. This ghastly incident is totally unrepresentative of the Raj.

The Daily Telegraph as recently as 1997 essayed to defend the atrocity by noting that five British civilians had been murdered the day before and that several public buildings had been burnt. Two wrongs do not make a right. If the culprits for those murders had been caught that would have been commendable. But to exact vengeance on the general public was a monstrous thing to do.

The condescension that some Britishers showed towards Indians was unpleasant and reprehensible. Imbecilic notions of racial superiority were not uncommon.

During the Indian Mutiny, British troops and pro-British Indians murdered at least several hundred civilians. This was not a case of collateral damage. This people were often wilfully slain by soldiers who knew them to be civilians. John Nicholson was, I blush to mention, an Irishman. He was the author of many of these crimes.

In the 1770s the EIC increased tax in Bengal during a famine. This was a horrific thing to do. Even without the tax rise many would have died of starvation. We tend to forget just how malnourished most people in most countries were until well into the 20^th century.

There were famines under the Raj as there had been throughout Indian history. There was an Agriculture Department. The Raj tried to improve husbandry and acreage yield. Modern agronomical techniques were introduced. There were warehouses for famine relief. Food was distributed to save the famished. Canals were dug for irrigation. The transport network moved food to afflicted zones. Yet still people died. More should have been done to save people.

The Raj pursued racially discriminatory policies at times. This is of course reprehensible. The utility of the Raj to India cancels out some of this wrongdoing. The haughty and self-conceited attitude of some Britons was lamentable.

Even if a fulsome apology were issued and compensation paid then the UK would still not be redeemed in the eyes of all Indians. Why the UK must apologise to India, but the Government of India must not apologise to its own people for its crimes against them is a riddle I cannot answer.

WHAT IF IT WAS WRONG?

If the Raj was so evil, then those who served it were traitors. I have heard Indians say that every country has a few turncoats which is why some Indians served the Raj. If this so, then these men can be tried for waging war against India. This offence still carries the death penalty.

One of India’s most decorated generals was Sam Manekshaw. He served the Raj. Should he have been executed? He was born in Amritsar a few years after the massacre.

There are those who say the British Raj is extant. The Naxalites say that and so did Rajiv Dixit. They are the real white supremacists: those who believes that whites rule India despite virtually no whites being there.

The Republic of Indian reaches out to the tribals. It wishes to acculturate and assimilate them. The tribals are scornfully called junglies by some. The notion that the state should reach out is a ramification of the Raj.

As the Republic of India took no action against those who worked for the Raj it shows that the government did not believe its own vapid rhetoric about India having been under enemy occupation. Soldiers, sailors, policemen and civil servants who zealously served the Raj were not penalised in any way after 1947. Independent India is a legatee of the Raj in that it gained from the expertise of these faithful servants of British India.

Why is it that Indian nationalists are still haunted by the Raj? There was relatively little griping about it in the first few decades after its termination. Queen Elizabeth II has been on several state visits to India. This is the supreme expression of amity between sovereign states. Such an invitation is only extended when there are not outstanding issues to be resolved. India has affirmed several times that there are no such problems. Yet in the last few years rabble rousers have sought to cause disharmonious relations with the United Kingdom.

The UK has given huge sums in aid since 1947. British charity workers have gone to India to work with underprivileged people. The UK has often sided with India in diplomatic disputes with other countries. The cordiality between the two nation states is imperilled by irresponsible ranting by the more inadequate sort of politician.

Much contumely is poured on Britain’s head because of Partition. India was rent in twain. That was not the UK’s wish or desire. It is facile to claim it was London’s doing. Partition was accompanied by saturnalia of looting and an orgy of raping as well as mass murder. But it was all Indians who did that. However, the British Army should have done more to stop it and shoot marauders.

There was an epoch when India was far more advanced than the British Isles. An Indian civilising mission to these islands would have been excellent. De-barbarising the British would have been a service to mankind.

The chastisement of rebels sometimes went too far. Sometimes the British Raj was bad. The aim of reprisals was to ensure there would be no repeat performance of 1857. There was little recidivism.

If on balance the Raj was wrong, then the UK should apologise.

CONCLUSION

We shall perhaps be able to return a final verdict on the British Raj only centuries in arrear. The Owl of Minerva takes wing only at dusk. It seems that the Raj was serendipitous for India.

Pax Romana was dissolved in Britannia so many centuries ago that people are able to analyse it objectively. I pay tribute to the tens of millions of men and women (mostly Indian) who served the British Raj.

In 1936 Benedict O’Gorman Anderson was born at Kunming, China. His birth in the Far East was possibly why he was scintillated by this region for his entire life. Benedict was born to an Irish father and an English mother. The father was working for the customs service. Pursuant to the unequal treaties, Western officials were in control of customs.

Benedict’s father had been sent down from Oxford just before the First World War. He had then joined the customs service and been posted to Cathay. When the Great War broke out this young man wished to volunteer for the colours. However, customs officers were too precious to risk. He was not allowed to enlist in the British Army or Royal Navy. Ironically, being expelled form university probably saved his life.

Two years after the birth of Benedict a brother named Perry followed. Then a sister was born.

Because of the Second World War, the Andersons relocated to California. The Andersons spoke with British upper class accents. In the United States this led to some bullying. The children soon adopted American accents.

When the Second World War ended the Andersons returned to the British Isles. More specifically they resided in County Waterford, Ireland. His American accent seemed very strange to people. There was almost no travel from the United States to Ireland in those days. Some people travelled from Ireland to the USA but almost no one came back.

Benedict has been told he was British: this was Irish and English. He discovered that most people in Ireland strenuously rejected the word ‘British’ for themselves. His Irish background was atypical. Some of his family were Catholics and some were Protestants. Catholics were the preponderance of the Irish population. Protestant were a small minority in Waterford. They were seen as a people apart from the mainstream community. Some of his father’s ancestors had come from Scotland in the 18^th century. Some of Benedict’s ancestors had wanted Ireland to sever all links with Great Britain. Some had been rebels. Others had been Home Rule politicians. One of his forbears had been a nationalist Member of Parliament.

Benedict was a child of prodigious intellectual capacity. Classics were the main subject in his schooling. He mastered Latin and Ancient Greek with celerity. He was also a bibliomaniac. Perhaps his exposure to several tongues by the age of seven had made him esurient for language. He was to amass an awestriking word hoard.

Eton was and is regarded as the foremost school on the planet. Benedict went there in 1949. It was at Eton that he discovered a treasury of European literature. His brother was to follow two years later. Benedict flourished academically. He was stupor mundi. He did not fare well at sports. In some ways Benedict and his sibling were the odd ones out. Most boys there were much wealthier than the Andersons. Most Etonians lived in the London or the Home Counties. The Andersons were unique in living in the Republic of Ireland.

After Eton, Benedict went to Cambridge University. There he read classics. He showed no affection for his school and university. He seldom ever returned to either.

Whilst Benedict was at school, he followed the dissolution of empires with intense curiosity. During his adolescence India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar (Burma) became independent. The same happened to Indonesia. He noticed the anti-colonial movement gathering pace in Africa. He felt sympathy for this movement. He was liberal left but did not identify with a party. Benedict was repulsed by racialism. Though he was a rebel by political inclination he was never contumacious or bumptious.

It seemed to many in the mid 1950s that the British Empire had a long way to run. That was why the United Kingdom took the trouble to extirpate Mau Mau. That was why the United Kingdom agreed with France and Israel to attack Egypt over the Suez Canal. Few in the British Isles questioned the efficacy or ethicality of white rule in South Africa. Benedict had no truck with tales of the splendiferous empire. He considered it to have been created by caterans. He was like one of his gurus A J P Taylor, a man who had strong views but held them weakly. In eviscerating imperialism Benedict was decent enough to acknowledge truths which militated against the case he was making. He noted that the British had sometimes acted as conservators of cultural heritage in their colonies. Not everything the metropole had done in the colonies had been calamitous, wrongheaded or unjust. However, Benedict insisted that racialism was the cardinal belief of imperialism and was therefore inherently illogical, unfair and foredoomed.

Benedict was the sort of unthreatening youth who might even have been a cicisbeo in former times. He was urbane, sophisticated, understatedly charming, well-dressed, self-effacing, debonair, unfailingly considerate and a good listener.

In 1956 Benedict went to study in the United States. He enrolled at Cornell University. His studying in the USA did not make him any less caterant in his excoriation of the United States. He had developed a fascination with Indonesia. This archipelago is a treasure trove of languages, cultures and subcultures.

At Cornell, Benedict did a PhD on Indonesia. In the 1960s he started to travel to Indonesia. He commenced learning Bahasa Indonesia.

Languages were a gift of Benedict’s. In fact, he was a hyperpolyglot. In addition to his native English he learnt Latin, Greek and French at school. Then he achieved mastery in Indonesian, Tagalog, Thai and Javanese.  Some of these are among the trickiest languages for an anglophone. He had a useful knowledge of Dutch, German, Spanish and Portuguese. His acquirement of magistery in these languages was all the more astonishing accomplished in his 40s! That is well after it is said the mind closes to new languages as the brain has lost its plasticity. This Irish Mezzofanti was capable of delivering a tongue lashing in Indonesian to leftist parties of Indonesia for giving Suharto an easy ride. He could speak demotic Indonesian or in high flown Indonesian. His sister who worked for Amnesty International was similarly talented. She was flawless in half a dozen obscure languages such as Albanian.

The whole of Benedict’s career was spent at Cornell. He was made a professor. He published a plethora of well-received scholarly articles in peer reviewed journals. His books were also acclaimed by fellow academics as superbly scholarly. He was soft-spoken, bonhomous, easy going and bore his erudition lightly.

In his 1960s visits to Indonesia, B. Anderson met many Indonesians who had fought against Dutch colonial rule 1945-49. He was an outspoken admirer of President Achmed Soekarno. The spelling of that surname was changed to Sukarno. In 1965 a huge wave of anti-communist killings took place. As Sukarno allowed this, Benedict was rancorously disillusioned. He said it was, ‘rather like discovering someone you love is a murderer.’

Because Benedict associated with communists in Indonesia, he provoked the wrath of the authorities in the late 1960s. He was permanently banned from the country.

Dr Anderson noted the iron that Soekarno damned the Dutch for making Indonesia a colony but dedicated his life to preserving the unity of that same Indonesia that only existed because of the Dutch. Benedict Anderson overlooked the fact that Soekarno only achieved his goal because of another empire: the Japanese.

In 1981 Professor Benedict Anderson published his magnum opus: Imagined Communities. It is a book that touched on anthropology, geography, history, philology and ethnography. The range of disciplines is indicative of Benedict’s intellectual scope and versatility.  Seldom have so many magisteria been seamlessly interwoven so elegantly in a single tome. In Imagined Communities Anderson quotes a dozen languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, Latin, Dutch, German, Tagalog and Bahasa Indonesia. Oftentimes, he does not translate them. He blithely assumed that his readership would be conversant with them. In this book Anderson propounded his claim that nationalism as we know it stated not in Europe as many erroneously presume but in America in the 18^th century. His skewered the Eurocentric presuppositions of many scholars such as orientalists. He noted that the Eurocentric notion that nationalism is predicated on language is often specious. He furnished numerous counterexamples. As he noted in the United States and in Latin America the language of the metropole was as he said, ‘not even an issue’ in separatist insurrectionary actuations.

People assumed nations to be ancient, but most are very recent creations. No nation is eternal. There was a time when no nation existed.  There shall be a time when many contemporary nations are lost to remembrance as many past ones have been.

A number of paradoxes are identified in the work. Each nation shares common features with the others, yet each nation is unique. Particularism is vital to nationality, but each nation shares at least some of these traits with its neighbours.  Nations are all about dividing and boundaries. But the real boundary spatially, ethnically, linguistically and temporally can seldom be clearly defined. The more dubious a nation’s boundaries are, the more vociferously they are asserted to be ironclad. The official boundaries and the actual boundaries to not always coincide. Anderson stated that a nation is an artificial construct. It has to be imagined by the elite at first. The masses are gradually inculcated into the cult of nationality.

Anderson observed that nation-ness is founded partly on an imagined commonality. It is often contingent on what are self-consciously myths. There are also some beliefs fervently asserted by nationalists that are falsehoods, but the nationalists are in denial about that. Sometimes a nation therefore needs literal imagining in order to exist. Nations require national acts of remembrance. But even more vital than that are collective acts of forgetting. Selective amnesia is needful to wipe the memory of atrocities committed by one segment of the nation against another. Crimes committed by the nation against others are to be de-emphasised if not obliterated from the public mind. The recentness of the nation’s foundation is often to be glossed over. That the nation was created by outsiders and defined by foreigners usually must be buried or even denied. A teleological approach to be past it adopted. Historians who are nationalists tend to read history backwards. They overdetermine subsequent outcomes as though certain things were predestined or foredoomed. They simply presume that the formation of their nation was predestined and desirable. They become partisan. Emotion always occludes judgment. Therefore, the nationalist is injudicious. His mind is befogged by chauvinism and jingoism.

Nations also need images to exist. They need a leader, iconic buildings, flags, emblems, sometimes a national plant or animal and often coinage. The map image is vital which is why it is so often displayed. Seeing it on the nightly weather forecast and on the classroom wall also seared this into the collective consciousness.

One of the standing puzzles of Imagined Communities is that although its author scorns nationalism is fallacious and perilous he is preoccupied with nationality. Whenever he mentioned some in the tome he invariably noted the person’s nationality.

Saying anything laudatory about nationalism had been seen to be trahison des clercs in the 1970s in the leftist circles in which Benedict moved. However, Benedict was never one for mindless conformity. He did not stint in limning the untold horrors wrought by nationalism. Yet he noted that nationalism can be the motor force for love, creativity, construction and all kinds of praiseworthy endeavours. It is as fertile a muse as romance. He observed that in the 20^th century alone tens of millions of people had been willing and even eager not only to kill but also to die for their nation. He closed the book pitying, ‘the poverty of such imaginings.’

Imagined Communities has become so renowned in academic circles that within a few years it was known simply as IC. This tome has become locus classicus for all those wishing to study the phenomenon of the modern nation-state.

IC was epoch making. A Marxist might even say it was world historical.

In 2001 I attended a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Society at Oxford University. I was due to go on a jaunt around South-East Asia, so I thought it meet to learn more about the region. The people at the meeting were mostly from countries such as Singapore, China and Malaysia. An old white British man came to address us. This white haired, cleanshaven and bespectacled gentleman appeared to be in his sixties. The man spoke in Received Pronunciation but not of the unwittingly comical variety. He was introduced as having been born in Far Eastern country: I forget which. His father was working on government service there. He spoke vividly about Indonesia. The old man noted that during the independence struggle Indonesians who wished to signal support for independence would use the Rupiah as currency and not the Netherlands East Indies Guilder.

The old man said the United States needed an anti-communist regime there in the 1960s. The USA would have found it impossible to prosecute its war in Indochina if there were another large communist nation in south-east Asia.

The speaker noted that the Indonesian Ambassador was due in a few days’ time. He said that the ambassador would claim that everything that the speaker said was a lie.

In 2005 Anthony James mentioned Imagine Communities. He told me of this fabulous book that exposed the fragilities and the artificialities of nationalism.

It was not until years later that I cast my mind back to that meeting. That must have been Benedict Anderson. I must find out if he was the one who addressed the society that day.

Benedict remained an Irish citizen all his life. Latterly he became an American citizen. That seemed to be solely a flag of convenience for him as he lived in the United States for decades. He eschewed all flag waving and displays of nationalism.

Perry, Benedict’s brother, edited New Left Review. Perry became an academic in California.

In 2015 Benedict Anderson died in his sleep at Bangkok. Born in China, died in Thailand: this English, Scots, Irishman was a citizen of the world. A memorial service was held for him at Cornell. It gratifies me very considerably that I heard his lecture.

Urbane, unmarried, courteous, genuine, unhurried, gentlemanly, compassionate, inquisitive, soft spoken, droll and erudite: Benedict was the archetypal renaissance man. They don’t make them like that anymore.

There are now many different kinds of internet sites and apps offering medical advice, but they all share one thing in common: they do more harm than good.

Why might online sources of medical advice be said to ‘do more harm than good’? Present a counter-argument. To what extent do you agree with the statement?

An online source of medical advice could do more harm than good because the advice offered is erroneous. These sites might not be regulated. Someone who is not professionally qualified might be running the site and have written the guidance. Furthermore, these sites rely on people accurately describing their symptoms.

People cannot always be trusted to do so. People can misdiagnose things. Some people are alarmists or fantasists. They make conditions out to be much worse than they really are. They might suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome or Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy. The former is where a person imagines that he or she has a medical condition. The person might put a great deal of time and effort into reading about symptoms so he or she can describe them in textbook languages. The person might even fake symptoms. Such a person can present himself or herself to a clinic or hospital and be very convincing because he or she knows exactly what to say. The patient might be genuinely convinced that he or she is suffering from the illness despite the patient having fabricated some of the symptoms. The person is faking it because he or she is seeking secondary gain. The person wants attention, sympathy and a sense of importance. The person might be afflicted with a martyrdom complex and like the idea of being seen to suffer.

Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy is where a parent or carer believes that a child or someone in his or her care has an illness. This is the same as Munchausen’s Syndrome except that the person driving the syndrome does not claim to suffer it himself or herself.

These apps and websites can easily be abused by people who imagine that they or their children suffer from an ailment. People can be very excitable and might panic. These sites sometimes offer advice about how to cure an illness without obtaining a prescription. People can treat themselves with things that are not prescription drugs. These treatments can cause illnesses or aggravate illnesses. This self-treatment is not taking place under any medical superintendence.

The counter argument is that anything that disseminates medical knowledge among the general public is to be applauded. There are a few foolish people who misuse any information. However, the generality of those who look to these sites and apps do so sensibly. They are able to diagnose their own illness and treat it sensibly. This can be something as simple as resting, drinking more water or taking light exercise. It might involve counsel about food or drink to avoid or perhaps to make sure that the person keeps warm. Sometimes a patient discovers that he or she is not ill at all.

There are some urgent illnesses that patients find out they have using things like apps and websites. For instance, take meningitis. If treated quickly the person can make a full recovery. However, if a person is not treated it can kill the person in 72 hours. It is vital that the person realises that this is a deadly illness and goes to accident and emergency fast. The app or website can make the patient apprehend the gravity of the situation immediately and to take action. Otherwise the patient might put it down to a bad headache and tarry. Even when the consequences are not fatal the person can be left brain damaged and have to have limbs amputated.

Apps and websites about health also triage minor conditions. It means that clinics and hospitals are not clogged up with a huge number of patients with trifling ailments that will clear up on their own without any intervention. This means that much pressed doctors and nurses then have sufficient time to treat people who really need care.

In conclusion, this essay largely disagrees with the title statement. Whilst there are some unwise people who will misuse and misunderstand information, on balance the desirable results of informing the public about their health surely outweigh the disadvantages.

It is nigh on a decade since Christopher Hitchens passed from the quick to the dead. As the world’s best-known atheist, he would be the first to say that he has not gone to any hereafter. His only immorality, he said, would be his three children. But perhaps he is mistaken. He may well have attained a literary immortality. He is one of the four horsemen of the anti-religious cause. Christopher Hitchens was a pugnacious, demosthenic rhetor and never a glib one.

Hitchens was so committed to the idea of living but a single life that he refused to have any exequies. His donated his carcass to medical science. It was an admirable bequest in many regards. However, his numberless admirers were deprived of a ceremony, of closure. He has no grave and no memorial.

Public intellectual is the label often appended to Hitchens. Mercifully, he was not a desiccated academic, producing articles of tedious pedantry couched in unreadable scholarese in utterly forgettable dusty journals. He was more middle brow and therefore eminently accessible. His work is enthralling and brimful of vim. His asperity towards his nemeses made his work all the more captivating. He was the superlative polemicist.

As a person Christopher was affable and engaging. He was possessed of an inimitable voice which bellowed out his uncompromising opinions. His voice was coarsened by decades of cigarette smoking and consuming heroic quantities of hard liquor. This lent a gravelly gravitas to that rich baritone. Though he was winsome he was never one to mince words.

Was Hitch a gadfly or a mere barfly? Some panned him as a controversialist. Others contemned him for his alcohol abuse. But for much of the freethinking movement he was and is totemic. Perhaps his celebrity status went to his head. He quoted approvingly Gore Vidal: never miss a chance to have sex or appear on TV?

Christopher’s joie de vivre was about friends, tobacco and alcohol: invariably together. It was to be the death of him. Bragging about his intake of these substances was one of his least attractive and most puerile traits. There was a streak of boyish bravado in him when it came to his self-destructive penchant. Perhaps he believed like William Blake, ‘the road of excess leads to the Palace of wisdom.’ He was certainly an aficionado of Blake’s poesy.

I wandered London in search of sites associated with C Hitchens. There is a bench upon which he filmed an interview in his hard hitting 1998 documentary: ‘Diana: the mourning after’. There is the door to the Private Eye office: he is seen going in there in that same documentary which he made in his trademark irreverent and combative style. His elan vital is sorely missed.

Hitchens was the author of some two dozen books on divers topics. He addressed himself to matters as eclectic as the Israel-Palestine Conflict, the works of Thomas Jefferson and the liberation of Iraq. The book on Iraq (The Long Short War) is one in which he lacerates the Ba’athists and their apologists.  He wrote sundry articles with aplomb on all sorts of issues. That gives you an indication of the breadth of the man’s talents and the catholicity of his interests. Reading his extraordinarily broad oeuvre is one of life’s benisons.

I trust it shall not be thought a belittlement of Hitchens to call him a controversialist. Many have dubbed him a contrarian but that does him an injustice. He did not take positions just to irk people or draw attention. His views were sincerely held. Likewise, the term provocateur would also be a misnomer. His foes were convinced that he was guilty of attention seeking perversity.

Because he was partisan, Christopher delighted in skewering his foes. His elegant character assassinations of those he hated were a rare treat to read. Almost everything he published was unputdownable. He lambasted figures from Jesus to George III to Mao to Stalin to Henry Kissinger to Princess Diana and Mother Theresa. In his countless articles he seemed to vindicate Henry Bulwer-Lytton’s maxim: the pen is mightier than the sword.

It was said of C Hitchens on one book’s dust jacket blurb, ‘there is simply no one else like him in Anglo-American letters’. Towards the end of his life Christopher H had acquired an enormous following. Though an avowed leftist he was held a remarkable allure for right wingers such as your humble servant. He became known as Hitch as his father had been. Indeed, he wrote a memoir entitled ‘Hitch 22’ a tongue in cheek allusion to Catch 22.

Hitch was acerbic, eloquent, oracular and forever frightfully farouche. His inattention to his appearance spoke volumes about his authenticity. He was candid enough to call himself a nicotine addict. If the truth be told he was also a functioning alcoholic.

The allure of Hitchens’ writing and his speechmaking was his uncanny ability to encapsulate things so succinctly. His phrasemaking was often aphoristic. His prognostications so often proved prophetic. As his dear friend Richard Dawkins said, Hitchens had a range of reference the like of which Dawkins had never seen; and Dawkins lived in Oxford. Hitch’s articulacy and verve was seldom equalled and never surpassed. He had an extraordinary knack of laying bare the bones of politicians or writer in but a few sentences.

Bon vivant is the epithet so often applied to Hitch. It was richly merited. By his 50s he was a voluptuary getting along on whiskey and ciggies. This hedonist certainly drank life to the lees. He was a model to us all. He was later to quip that if he had known he would live so long then he would have taken better care of himself. But what is the point in dying in perfect health? One might as well enjoy one’s body.

Socialist though he proclaimed himself to be until his mid-40s, Hitch always chose to avoid living in a socialist country. He had acquired a taste for luxury. This was one of many contradictions and hypocrisies to the man.

It is to my lasting regret that I never met Christopher Hitchens. I only came to know his oeuvre in 2008 when I read God is not great. In this tome he expatiated on the Wednesbury irrationality of all major religions and by implication the minor ones too. This infidel produced perhaps the best-selling antireligious tract of all time. The blasphemer must have got death threats for it.

Despite Hitch’s very decided views he was also fair minded. He would give credit where it was due to his foes.

Christopher was a reprobate perhaps because he believed he had but a solitary life. He was not going to squander it in self-denial.

Through Hitchens I learnt so many words. Loam, crepuscular, epicene, preachments and unwisdom were just a few of those he added to my lexis. His command of the language was masterful.

Why does Hitch still matter? Some of his messages are just as pertinent today as they were in his lifetime. That is to be lamented. The perpetual struggle between the Enlightenment and the forces of unreason goes on. Tyranny raises its ugly head. Unfreedom is as mighty as ever before. Therefore, it is as well to remind ourselves what civilised values are. We must pledge ourselves to unsleeping vigilance against those who would compromise away liberty.

Childhood

Christopher Eric Hitchens was born at Portsmouth, United Kingdom in 1949. He was the son of a Royal Naval officer. His status was middle middle middle class. On his mother’s side Christopher had Hebraic ascendants but he did not know that till he was almost 40. The Hitchens family went through the motions of Anglicanism. They were what might be flippantly called C and E: Christmas and Easter. His father was a Conservative voter; and his mother was a sentimental Labour type. His diminutive, serious-minded and austere father was dutiful and uninspiring. Christopher had a closer bond with his mother. Her gaiety and free spiritedness appealed to him.

The family soon moved to what was then the British colony of Malta. Here Christopher’s only sibling Peter was born. Peter was to make his name as a reactionary, prudish and pecksniffian journalist. It might seem that two more different men were never sprung from the same womb. But you would be wrong. They were both passionate provocateurs. Peter seemed to take after his father in severity, sartorial conventionality and judgementalism. Peter even sought to be commissioned in the Royal Navy: a chip off the old block. Hitchens minor was rejected on the grounds of ophthalmological deficiencies. Peter was for a time a red hot Trotsykist – not a Trotskyist as he would be quick to correct you.

The huge Royal Navy was there to keep the sea lanes of Pax Britannica open. But the empire was running out of colonies and cash. The two were related. As the empire was transmogrified into the Commonwealth the Royal Navy faced swingeing cuts.

The Hitchens family were posted to North Britain and later South Britain. Soon Hitchens pere left the Royal Navy to become a prep school bursar. It was the sort of dull post that suited a man of minor authority who suffered from an outsized sense of propriety and self-importance.

Christopher attended prep school. He shone academically. He had always taken the liveliest interest in current affairs. Why were French paratroopers in Algiers about to fly to Paris to launch a coup d’etat?

Hitch came to believe that the British Empire was wicked. The sooner it and all empires broke up so much the better.

The Leys School in Cambridge was selected for Christopher’s secondary schooling. It is called the Leys because of the Anglo-Saxon word ‘lea’ as in field. It sits hard by the River Cam in what used to be a flood meadow. This was one of the only posh Methodist schools around. Christopher was elated to be living in Cambridge. There he made two decisions that were to define his life. He identified as a Labour supporter and he shunned all religion.

When it was founded, the Methodist Church had been accused of irreligion by the Church of England. Therefore, a Methodist foundation had more sympathy for the underdog than one would have founded in an Anglican school. Every Sunday a Methodist minister from a gritty proletarian parish would preach to the boys. Through this they came to know something of the lives of the underprivileged. The Leys was not as purblindly pro-establishment as its Anglican equivalents. In the mid 19^th century, the Methodist Conference had decided to found a school for affluent Methodists in either Oxford or Cambridge. Eventually the choice fell on Cambridge.

In the 1960s racial bigotry was not uncommon in the United Kingdom. Apartheid was going strong in South Africa. Some Tories vociferated for it. It was a time when outspoken racial bigotry could even be an advantage in British politics. Hitch was totally opposed to ethnic prejudice in all its manifestations. He detested colour prejudice. He recognised that anti-Semitism is so often comorbid with other psychosocial delinquencies. Its pathology is common to so many anti-enlightenment and anti-intellectual movements. Those who espouse this egregiously damnable worldview are those who are cognitively subnormal and easy prey for conspiracy theorists.

A voracious reader from his earliest boyhood, educated himself. He drank deep of George Orwell. Orwell was to become a role model for him. Happily, their lifespans overlapped – just! Orwell died the year after Hitchens was born. The parallels between them are striking. Both were children of the empire. Orwell was born in a colony (India) though Hitchens was not but Hitchens’ father had been posted as far away as the Chinese port of Wei Hai Wei and Hitch later spent two years of his toddlerhood in Malta. Both grew up in middle class families with financial difficulties. Both of them attended independent boarding schools. They both joined the Labour Party and both made their names as writers. Both recognised the USSR for the oppressive hellhole it was.

Christopher was later to become enamoured of Orwell. He even wrote a book on him Why Orwell matters. It is perhaps Hitchens’ most unimpressive books, replete with banalities. It is hackneyed. There is little in it about Orwell that had not been said before.

At school Hitch signed up for every left-wing view going. He opposed the white man’s war in Indochina. He abominated apartheid and sought an end to white mastery in the rest of Africa.

Hitch was clearly and anti-establishmentarian. That did not mean he did not wish to benefit from the finest education going. He set his sites on Oxford. In the meantime, he was awkward for the school authorities.

The young Christopher had a late growth spurt. He was also a failure at sport but excelled academically. Such a combination means that he was not universally liked.

Dabbling in homosexuality almost got Christopher expelled. This was just after homosexual acts had been decriminalised. His father was not scandalised. Having been a naval officer he knew what young men deprived of female society got up to. Presumably, he hoped his son would grow out of this Ganymede behaviour as soon as he had access to the fair sex. If so; then he was not to be disappointed.

Oxford

In 1967 Christopher went up to Balliol College, Oxford. This is arguably the oldest college in Oxford University. For a century is had been among the most illustrious college in the university. In the late 19^th century Benjamin Jowett had made it mass produce colonial governors. There was a well known piece of doggerel about him;

Here come I, my name is Jowett.
All there is to know I know it.
I am Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge!

There was even a hymn composed entitled: For Balliol men now in Africa. In the early 20^th century is specialised in Liberal and Labour politicians. By a happy coincidence Balliol was also the college of Richard Dawkins who was later to become a close friend of Hitchens. Dawkins had ‘gone down’, in Oxford parlance, from Balliol a few years before Hitchens ‘went up.’

At Oxford, Christopher read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. For a budding politician or journalist, it was the subject to read. PPE, or modern greats as some called it, was designed to train people for leadership.

Christopher thrived at Oxford. Revolution was in the air and so was cannabis. He was never overly fond of drugs, but he smoked cigarettes like a chimney. He also acquired a taste for liquor. He threw himself into the Labour Club with his characteristic panache. He was forever participating in protests. He embraced the anti-apartheid cause and that of decolonisation. He was proud to say he was soixante-huitard even before 1968.

Hitchens family finances were not flush. Therefore, his father could extend him only a meagre allowance. Many undergraduates were in the same boat. Not everyone was from a wealthy household. Nonetheless, Oxford seems to have been elysian for him.

Though primarily straight, Christopher claimed to have bedded two men who later served in Thatcher’s cabinet. Possibilities have been identified. None have confirmed that they did it with him. There were not that many men who overlapped with him at Oxford and went on to be cabinet ministers under Thatcher. It was conjectured that one of those he has a horizontal encounter with was Hon William Waldegrave. The Provost of Eton crimsons at the very suggestion and embarrassedly denies it.

After Varsity, Hitch outgrew homosexuality inasmuch as his waistline did. Her later became so unappetising that only females would do it with him.

In the summer 1968 Hitchens went to Cuba. He was volunteering to work on the harvest there. He wanted to see if Castro had created a genuinely socialist society. Hitchens was a Trotskyite and despised the USSR as a degenerated socialist state. He loathed authoritarianism of whatever colour. Hitchens had decidedly mixed feelings about Castro. He still regarded it as preferable to the banana republicanism that prevailed in most of Latin America.

When Hitch was coming back from Cuba he found out about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was horrified that Moscow was snuffing out even the limited freedom permitted by Alexander Dubcek.

Mindless conformity was later on anathema to Hitch. However, in the 1960s his views seem to have been a checklist of leftist shibboleths.

In finals Hitch took a third class degree. This was awarded to perhaps the bottom 10% of undergraduates. This was a scandalously poor result from someone so erudite. Perhaps he was too busy with his activism. It was as though the whole of the remainder of his life he strove to live down his mediocre degree class. Perhaps that is why he larded his work with Latinisms. Was he laying it on a bit thick?

Journalism

Upon graduating Hitchens landed a job as a trainee BBC producer. He went down to London. In those days one could live well on such a salary. Rents were cheap as chips.

Before long Hitch was making waves in journalism. He did not tarry long as the BBC. He joined the New Statesmen. This far left weekly had short but penetrating articles about politics in the UK and abroad. He was often sent overseas on assignment. In the 70s he wrote an astonishingly flattering piece about Iraq under the Ba’athists.  Part of this was he took an instant liking to his government minder there. This hard drinking homosexual introduced himself as the Iraqi Oscar Wilde.

Clive James was the TV reviewer of the decade. The Australian Cambridge graduate came to be a friend of Hitchens. They bonded over their Marxist worldview and satirical take on society.

By the 70s Hitchens was in the International Socialists. This Trotskyist outfit spurned both the US and Soviet models. It derided both capitalism and Soviet style communism as morally bankrupt imperialisms. He had left wing views on every issue and was pro-abortion.

The key word in the Internationalist Socialists was the first one. Hitch was very cosmopolitan. He was later to downplay and eventually reject socialism and all ideologies. It was as his guru Paine said: my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

Trotskyism was perhaps the worst thing about Christopher Hitchens. Trotsky was a mass murder just as bad as Stalin. The only difference is that Stalin jostled Trotsky aside in the 1920s. The Red Army under Trotsky committed many, many large-scale atrocities just like its foes. Trotsky commanded the troops at Kronstadt. Here fellow socialists, the sailors of the Red Navy, had mutinied over the oppression of the Bolsheviks. Leon Trotsky believed in executing hostages. He had no compunction about slaying civilians. He was violently intolerant and a total anti-democratic. Hitch never chose to live in a communist state because he was a bon viveur. Communist lands are airless. He would have had no scope for free expression there. It is noisome that he idolised Trotsky who published a book entitled, In defence of terror.

Hitch was bolshie in both politics and persona. His diatribes were eminently readable, but his manner was off putting to some. Nonetheless he was clubbable. Christopher was the life and soul of the party. He never said no to a drink. He was as engaging in person as he was upon the page.

Hitch tried to examine the Arab-Israeli Conflict dispassionately. As he saw it, he had no axe to grind other than he inculpated the United Kingdom for occasioning the conflict. As he did not know of his Jewish ancestors and ancestresses at the time his claim to complete objectivity can be taken at face value. When he later discovered his Hebraic heritage, he said it would not make on whit of difference to his judgment. He came to know Edward Said and co-authored a book with him on the plight of the Palestinian nation.

The marriage of Hitchens’ parents foundered. They believed in keeping up appearances. They did not divorce. They appeared as a couple when social occasions demanded it.

Hitch’s disdain was religion deepened when his mother took up with a defrocked Anglican priest. It got worse. The couple became votaries of a conman, sorry, guru. In the 60s and 70s fashionable people had a weakness for Indian spiritualism. This made them easy marks for an Indian who pretended to proffer some profundities in exchange for hard cash. Maharishi Yogi was the soi disant ‘perfect master.’ He was indeed perfect at mastering the art of convincing the gullible to hand over their money. This Chaucerian chancer was a type that Hitch was to meet in every religion. At G K Chesterton said, when people cease to believe in religion they do not believe in nothing: they believe in anything.

The romance between Hitchens’ mother and her paramour gang awry. They went to Athens. For some reason folie a deux occurred. Christopher later discovered his mother had tried to call him six times.

Christopher Hitchens found out that a woman with the surname Hitchens had been found dead in an Athenian hotel room. Hitchens is a highly unusual surname. Christopher was asked to go to Greece to see if the corpse was his mother.

It turned out that Hitch’s mother had committed suicide. It was an event so traumatising that 40 years later he would not reveal the content of the suicide note that she had written to him. Christopher was forever plagued by the thought that if she had got through to him by phone as she tried to do, she would not have been part of that suicide pact. He flew to Greece to identify his mother’s cadaver. He recalled having to cross a priest’s palm with silver to have her interred in sacred ground. Obsequies were performed for his mother Yvonne despite her having explicitly shunned the Christian faith and embraced faux Hinduism whilst living in sin with a man of the cloth. The high moral principle of not burying a self-destroyer in consecrated ground could be circumvented for a little hard currency. You might think that the Church has low moral standards. On the contrary: $50 is a very high moral standard. ‘Twas ever thus.

Despite Hitch’s sorrowful introduction to Greece, it was a land that he was to fall in love with. He visited many times and indeed wed a Greece. He reviled the colonels’ junta. Many of its Greek leftist friends were its victims. Hitch was furious but unsurprised that the US backed the military dictatorship saying that the cradle of democracy was unfit for democracy.

Later he visited Cyprus. It inspired him to write a history of the troubled island. He lamented how the home of Aphrodite had been a victim of colonial machinations several times over. He said that Archbishop Makarios was the only priest whom he ever took to.

Hitch married a Greek Cypriot in a Greek Orthodox Church. That might seem hypocritical for an evangelising atheist. The union was blessed with progeny. He was so philhellene that his firstborn was named Alexander. It pleased Hitch no end that his son spoke modern Greek and was a classicist. Hitch was so fixated with the classics that it is significant that his two daughters also had names relating to the Classical Mediterranean: Sophia (‘wisdom’ in Greek) and Antonia (a Latin name).

The first marriage of Hitchens must have ended badly. He wrote nary a word about it in his autobiography.

In the early 1970s Hitchens came to know Martin Amis. This was his closest friendship. Martin said it was like an unconsummated marriage or a love ‘whose month was ever May.’ Hitch was already enthralled by Kingsley Amis – the father of Martin. By befriending Martin, Hitch gained access to the father. Kingsley’s novels One Fat Englishman seemed to describe the character that Hitch later turned into. In one of Martin’s novels, Hitch was featured as a character.

The poet James Fenton was a dear friend of Christopher. It was a friendship that lasted a lifetime.

In the last couple of years of W H Auden’s life, Christopher came to know the celebrated poet. Christopher recalled that Auden – who was gay – took a shine to Kingsley’ Amis’ ‘’lovely young son’’ as Auden called him.

On an early visit to America, Hitch met Pelham Grenville Woodhouse. Like Stephen Fry, Hitch was an avid fan of P G Woodhouse the author of the Bertie Wooster series of novellas. Fry indeed had corresponded with Woodhouse whilst a schoolboy. As Woodhouse died in 1975, Fry never got to meet the great man.

Christopher spent time in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. The Troubles were erupting.  Hitch befriended Eamonn McCann in Derry. He rapidly came to the conclusion that the UK should jettison Northern Ireland despite the settled will of a high majority of the people there to remain within the United Kingdom. Hitch believed that the Six Counties should fuse with the Republic of Ireland. It was staggering that a secularist should want a secular province to be forced to unite with a quasi-theocracy. As a socialist he should not have wanted to deprive the people of Northern Ireland of the welfare they received as British citizens.

Despite his sympathy for Irish nationalism, Hitch had no allusions about the brutality of the IRA. He came quite close to being shot by them despite them knowing him to be a journalist.

By the late 70s Hitch was disillusioned with Labour. The British Army in Northern Ireland had abused terrorist suspects under a Labour Government. Therefore, Hitch wondered if the Tories would be better. The mistreatment of suspects is not to be condoned. However, this must be kept in perspective. It is by no means the worst thing that happened in the Troubles.

In the 70s Hitch vociferated for the cause of black nationalism in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He later remarked that Mugabe subsequently turned into everything that Mugabe’s enemies had accused him of being. So often Hitch summarised the situation so succinctly.

By the late 1970s he was well known on Fleet Street. Being a journalist was much better paid then than it is now.

On one occasion Hitch had his bottom publicly spanked with a rolled-up newspaper by Margaret Thatcher. She chided him as a ‘naughty boy’ and gave ‘a roll of the hip.’ Hitch could hardly believe it himself but had witnesses to the incident.

America

By 1980 Hitch said he was bored of London. Grub Street held little more allure for him. He had friends there such as James Fenton but for him the United States beckoned. In 1981 he packed his bags for Washington. He was to spend almost half his life in the United States.

Strangely for a socialist, America was the promised land. He saw it as the birthplace of revolution. As an anti-monarchist and an egalitarian, he saw it as the land of opportunity. Free speech and secularism appealed to him enormously. He was glad to get away from old grey England. It was jaded, staid, stale and grandmotherly.

Hitch had a green card. He wrote for numerous publications. He often penned pieces for the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He became a friend of Michael Moore.

Christopher fulfilled some of the criteria for a stage Englishman. This Englishman abroad had a pukka accent, had attended Oxford, had a certain pomposity to him and could be charm itself when he wanted to. On the other hand, he always managed to look and sound as though he had only just rolled out of bed. His acerbic nature, hard left views, anti-monarchism and high functioning alcoholism were not among the stereotypes that Americans expected to see in an upper middle class Englishman.

Thomas Paine was an icon for Hitch. He later wrote a book on this man. Hitch desired to ‘live to some purpose’ as Paine had said of himself. In this Hitch succeeded many times over.

Over his 30 years in the United States, Hitch acquired some Americanisms. However, his accent scarcely attenuated.

In the USA, Hitch enjoyed a much higher salary than he had earned in the UK. He treated himself a lot. He was a literal champagne socialist.

In the USA, Hitch was aghast at Reaganism. The war on crime and the war on drugs were unparalleled acts of imprudence, folly, profligacy and injustice. Reagan’s immoral and illegal support for the most rapacious plutocrats in Central America filled Hitch with righteous wrath. Hitch was staggered that Reagan would assist narco-terrorists whilst denouncing drug use as inherently evil. Yet Reagan got away with it all.

Reagan invaded Grenada. The British Government did not warn the Grenadians despite Grenada being ruled by Elizabeth II. Hitch thought that this underscored the wickedness of US policy, the cravenness of the British and uselessness of the monarchy. Despite this flagrant act of illegal aggression, the US got away with it Scot free.

In Washington DC Hitch befriend Sidney Blumenthal. The journalist was an active Democrat. Years later they had a falling out when Hitch revealed remarks that Blumenthal had allegedly said in a private conversation. Blumenthal was by then working for President Clinton. The Clinton Administration had striven to besmirch the reputation of Monica Lewinsky with whom the president had had an extramarital sexual relationship. What Blumenthal had allegedly said in private totally contradicted his public pronouncements on la Lewinsky.

By the 1980s Hitch identified with Labour again. Many Trotskyites did which caused the party no end of ructions. He lamented that Mrs Thatcher was letting the United States use the UK as an aircraft carrier. It was as though George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 was coming true. The United Kingdom was no more than Air Strip One.

In 1982 Argentina invaded the Falklands. Leftists in the UK said that the Argentines were welcome to it. Britain should not engage in yet another colonial farce. Hitch was almost alone on the left in rejecting this analysis. He wanted the islands to be saved for democracy. He also believed that defeating Argentina would do that country a favour. The Military dictatorship would fall and freedom would be restored. His lonely voice on the left proved to be prophetic. By curious irony his father was one of the few Tories who was dead against the liberation of the Falklands.

Princess Diana was the secular saint of the 1980s. Hitch knew she was decent to AIDS victims. However, he still thought the monarchy was anachronistic and harmful. He wrote a book against it. He said the monarchy was Britain’s favourite fetish. He denounced it as reactionary and inegalitarian.

In the 1980s Hitch became increasingly cognizant of the growing menace of Islamism. Hitch disbelieved and disrespected all religions. However, he recognised that an antediluvian form of Islam was egregiously pernicious. He had seen the Middle East regress centuries in just a decade. That was because of Islamic fundamentalism funded by Saudi petrodollars. The retrograde and obscurantist Wahabi ideology was particularly puritanical and violently intolerant. This viciously anti-feminist, homophobic creed was disseminated throughout the Mohammedan world. Islamist states permitted slavery in all but formal designation.

Salman Rushdie was a dear friend of Hitch. In 1989 Rushdie published his satirical novel The Satanic Verses. This sendup of Islam did not play well in Dar al Islam. Rushdie is a British Indian. The Mumbai born author was raised a nominal Muslim. The publication of his novel was greeted wrathfully throughout the Muslim world.  There were protests in the United Kingdom. Mohammedans demanded that the book be prohibited for offending their faith. Disgracefully, some Labour MPs joined in this effort to end free expression.

Some Tories said that Rushdie was endangering lucrative contracts with Muslim countries. They were irked that a brown man should impair relations with the brown world. Some muttered that Rushdie was not really British and was only in the UK on sufferance.

Hitch sprang to the defence of his friend. Of course, Rushdie had the untrammelled right to publish whatsoever he pleased. There must be no compromise on free expression. This was one issue in which he was an absolutist.

In the late 1980s Hitch’s first marriage broke up. He married Carol Blue. They later had a daughter.

Hitch was incredibly well travelled.  He was in Moscow for a while where his brother later worked. He had been to everywhere from Argentina to Zimbabwe. He had been to Sri Lanka, Australia, Poland, and just about anywhere else you care to mention.

When the Romanian Revolution broke out Hitch was there to see it. He applauded the overthrow of Ceausescu.

Interventionism

The Iraqi annexation of Kuwait was greeted by most leftists with indifference. One Ishmaelite dictatorship swallows another. Iraq was at least secular. However, Hitchens was fully aware of the genocide that the Ba’athists in Iraq had perpetrated against the Kurds. The only way to stop this forever was to oust the Ba’athist tyrant Saddam Hussein. Hitch had no time for the absolute monarchy of Kuwait. He also reviled George Bush senior. Nonetheless, he threw his weight behind the mission to liberate Kuwait hoping this would then bring down Saddam. It was an unpopular position on the left. For many leftists, the USA could do no right.

Perhaps oddly for a leftist, Hitch jubilated the dissolution of the USSR. He considered it a perversion of the socialist idyll. He believed in multiparty democracy. He felt odium for autocracy. Further, he said that the end of the Cold War came as a blessed relief. The world was no longer living in the shadow of a mushroom could. Until that time the Third World War would have erupted at any time.

By the 1990s Hitch no longer believed as he once had done as a Marxist that global capitalism was about to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Despite being a socialist he founded economics tedious. He was an acquisitive capitalist in his way. He was certainly a champagne socialist. He did not stint in treating himself to the finer things in life. In that wise he was totally hypocritical. His compassion for the needy never extended to giving them a groat.

In 1992 Hitch took a grave dislike to William Jefferson Clinton and his wife Hillary ‘Rodham’ Clinton. It was a loathing that never left him. As C Hitchens elucidated, his detestation of this gruesome twosome was not political. He did not find their political opinions so objectionable. What got his goat was their insincerity and posturing. Here were two people who would do anything to grub for votes. When Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, he broke of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to fly home to Little Rock so he could sign the death warrant of a mentally subnormal black man named Ricky Ray Rector. There was no need for Clinton to return to his state to do this. He could have signed the order and had it sent. But he wanted to maximise publicity for this act. Clinton reasoned that mercilessness would play well with the electorate. He would not allow himself to be outflanked on the right when it came to crime as Michael Dukakis has been in 1988. Rickie Ray Rector was executed despite having the mind of a toddler.

The suspicion that Bill Clinton was a rapist never left C Hitchens. His horror at the immorality of the Clintons lost Hitch friends on the left. People would ask Hitch whether he would prefer the notoriously dim-witted Dan Quayle as president?  Hitchens reprobated people who lowered themselves to using this forced choice as a reason to forgive the unrepentant Clinton for a plethora of transgressions.

Later on, Hitch skewered the Clintons with a book entitled Nobody left to life to: the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. He rejected as false the notion that because the Republicans were bad it was wrong to tell the truth about Clinton.

Hitch was not universally liked among the Washington press corps. Some journos in DC called him Christopher Snitchens. Furthermore, a piece on him was published entitled ‘Brit Twit.’ The other hacks disliked him sometimes out of envy. He was also one to rub some people up the wrong way. His manner was often self-important, moralising, stilted and even haughty.

Despite his fascination with the United States there was much about the land of the free that he despised. He thought the war on drugs was asinine and cruel. He abominated the religious right. Hitch remained a socialist but was less and less voluble on that issue as time went on.

In the mid-1990s Hitch visited the former Yugoslavia on assignment. He spoke up for the cause of the Bosniaks. He thought that religion was the root of the conflict. He set his face against Russia’s pro-Serb policy. Hitch believed that the West should intervene to save Sarajevo. This was a very unfashionable view at the time. He was irate that the US and UK refused to intervene fully.

It was over the Yugoslav issue that Hitch fell out with Noam Chomsky. Up until this point, he had applauded many of Chomsky’s musings. Chomsky was so eager to eviscerate the United States that he became a cheerleader for Serbs who ethnically cleansed other groups.

Though Hitch was glad that the USSR fell he was worried that the Orthodox Church was resuming its position of censor. He described it as sinister.

Anti-totalitarianism was key to Hitchens’ worldview. That was to define the rest of his life.

Christopher described himself as a nicotine addict. He was contumelious of the Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole for denying the irrefutable fact that smoking is bad for you.

In 1995 Hitch presented a documentary in which he took aim at someone to whom public opinion had accorded far too much exaltation. His target was Mother Theresa. He sought to de-canonise her before she had even died. As he remarked himself ‘who else would have the bad taste’ even to attempt such a task. His debunking of her saintly image was refreshing and confrontational like almost everything he did. He assumed the mantle of advocatus diabolus. When the Albanian nun died, and her correspondence was published it indicated that Hitch had been closer to the mark than anyone could have imagined. The woman herself had grave doubts about her faith. Moreover, she had encouraged Princess Diana to divorce despite this flying in the face of Catholic dogma. She preached a very different gospel to the lower orders.

The book about Mother Theresa was entitled The Missionary Position. He argued that her preachments increased suffering and poverty. Her unswerving opposition to contraception meant that countless millions were born into griding penury every year.

By the late 1990s Hitch was so widely recognised as a writer that he was offered a visiting professorship. This is richly ironic in view of his poor academic performance.

In the 1990s Hitch came across a sentence by the Irish politician and diplomat Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien. In it, the late Cruise O’Brien – a former Irish Labour Party politician – said that he was really a liberal and not a socialist because of the things he cherished most. That crystallised it for Hitch. He realised that he had become a liberal rather than a socialist.

When Hitch had been a socialist, despite his much-vaunted compassion for the needy he never gave them so much as an old English groat. It was far more important to put alcohol down his gullet. Even when he was a socialist, he sent his children to fee paying schools. Giving up privilege was for other people to do. He was a huge fan or Orwell and Hitch plainly believed that some animals were more equal than others.

One of Hitch’s pet hates was Henry Kissinger. As human rights legislation became more entrenched and tyrants found themselves on trial, Hitch longed for the day he would see Dr Kissinger in the dock. However, he regarded it as particularly improbable. As he could not legally arraign the former US Secretary of State he decided to do so in literary form. His book the Trial of Henry Kissinger sets out the mountain of irrefragable evidence that Kissinger broke US and international criminal law on a gargantuan scale.

By a curious irony one of the occasions on which Kissinger’s legendary diplomacy slipped was when he was photographed staring at Princess Diana’s decolletage at a dinner party. The princess was another target of Hitch.

Tony Blair was someone who Hitch praised to the moon. Blair had brought Labour back into government. Both were Europhiles. Blair reached the peak of his stock with Hitch when Blair liberated Iraq. The two later shared podia to debate religion. Hitch adulated Blair’s ‘panache’ in Blair’s ‘People’s Princess’ oration. It was odd that Hitch the soi-disant Trotskyist should embrace Blair who took the socialism out of the Labour Party.

In the 1990s Hitch sounded the alarm on the growing menace of Al Qa’eda. People preferred to believe they could ignore this problem and it would go away. Hitch called out Saudi Arabia for backing much Islamist terrorism. Much of the US establishment was in denial about what their supposed ally was doing.

The War on Terror

9/11 threw things into sharp relief. As Hitch said: on one said there was everything he loved and on the other was everything he hated. It was a straightforward battle between good and evil. Civilisation was lined up against barbarism. There could be no middle way.

The liberation of Afghanistan was fulsomely supported by Hitch. He travelled thither. It was uncomfortable for him to recognise that some of the Taliban had been Western allies in the 1980s. Nevertheless, he rejoiced in the death of Talibs.

Odium is much underrated as Hitch said. It can get you out of bed in the morning. His hatred of religious mania was his driving force.

The adage runs that you can take a man out of the far left but you cannot take the far left out of a man. Hitchens had abandoned Trotskyism’s objectives yet some it stayed with him attitudinally. He was still an iconoclast. He seemed to believe in the Trotskyist maxim: the worse the better. The more wars the better. He relished confrontation. His worldview was sometimes Manichean. He lauded America’s righteous war for democracy. He turned Nelson’s eye to America’s collusion with tyrannies from Saudi Arabia to Uzbekistan in its pursuit of the Taliban and Al Qa’eda.

American right wingers embraced Hitch with fervour. It was rare to have a progressive writer of such stature to advocate for the war on terror with such fervour.

The axis of evil – as identified by George W Bush – was also loathed by Hitch. The regimes of North Korea, Iraq and Iran were some of the worst in the world. Hitch thought it meet to emancipate the long-suffering peoples of these nations. He had visited all three of these countries. He lambasted North Korea for having Kim Il Sung as eternal president despite his death in 1994. Hitchens’ showed off his lexis but saying that that state was a thanatocracy or a mortocracy.

When it came to the Iraq War in 2003, Hitch was a perfervid vindicator of the liberation of Iraq. This was unfashionable on the left. Hitch’s reasons for wanting Iraq to be freed were simple: to end tyranny. He wanted to Kurds to be permanently free of the threat of genocide being completed. Their homeland in northern Iraq might not always be a safe haven. The US might one day tire of providing air cover. The Turks might invade. The only long-term solution was the ouster of the Ba’athists.

The weapons of mass destruction issue did not concern Hitch overmuch. Many consider it to have been a canard. Hitch went to Iraq and visited his Kurdish friends. In speaking up for their liberation Hitch lost many of his Western friends such as Michael Moore. Many leftists were aghast with Hitchens. How could an anti-imperialist support Western intervention in Mesopotamia.

Iraq did not turn into a perfect democracy. Much went wrong under the American occupiers. Hitchens blamed this on Ba’athists remnants, Al Qaeda and the Iranians.

The US waterboarded terrorist suspects. Hitch instantly condemned this and the abuses in Abu Ghraib Prison. This did not mean that he equivocated in the war on terror. He underwent waterboarding of his own freewill to see what it was like. He held to his view that the liberation of Iraq was amply justified and had produced a better Iraq with a pertinacity bordering on closed mindedness.

Hitch endorsed George W Bush in 2004. He said he was a single-issue voter: on civilisation. Despite his many disagreements with Bush junior, Hitch said that the president was right on the central thing. That was that Al Qa’eda must be annihilated.

One of the most moving pieces that Hitch penned was meeting the family of a young American who had joined the US Army because he was inspired by Hitch’s opinion pieces on Iraq. This young man was deployed to Iraq and killed in action. Hitch’s work meant so much to the deceased that the dead soldier’s family invited the writer to be with them when the scattered the ashes of their beloved son. He was in unenviable the position that W B Yeats once composed a poem about: did his writing send a man out to fight and out meet his doom?

After over a quarter of a century in the United States, Hitch became an American citizen. He was sworn in on his birthday by the head of Homeland Security. He had always been enthralled by the US. Its idylls of equality, free expression and diversity appealed to him enormously. Yet he noted that the United States so often failed to live up to its admirable founding principles. Hitch later wrote a piece about himself entitled ‘All American.’

Christopher Hitchens had a compendious knowledge of English literature and of the history of the anglosphere. He also read up on the literature of Mediterranean Antiquity in translation. He cited Lucretius as an early atheist. He noted even the Bible states that there were freethinkers in ancient Israel. A psalm reads: the fool says in his heart there is no god.

As in the Iraq controversy, Hitch was spoiling for another fight. As he entitled one of his books he was always: Looking for trouble. He toured the United States in the company of a Christian fundamentalist pastor. Despite the gulf between them the two men formed a rapport. Thought he loathed religion he was canny enough to respect his disputants and wily and often formidable debaters. Their acuity and assiduity when it came to rhetorical sleight of hand was not to be underestimated. Their worldview had an emotional purchase on the faithful that trumped cold reason. They offered hope and he offered butc the cold and silent grave.

When it came to 2008, Hitch expressed his relief and elation that Hillary Clinton did not secure the Democratic nomination. He read Obama’s memoirs assiduously. The clarity and sincerity of Obama’s writing won Hitchens over though there was one admission of skulduggery on Obama’s behalf. Barak Obama opined that if you are going to get into politics in Chicago you need to go to a church. Relieved that Obama’s religiosity was solely a show for electoral purposes, Hitchens endorsed him. He railed against John McCain as senile.

The God Delusion was published by Professor Dawkins. Hitch was a confidante of Dawkins. Dawkins’ angle was mainly educational. He had had the chair in the public understanding of science. Christopher saw that there was money and publicity to be had from an all-out attack on faith. Therefore, he sharpened his pencil.

In 2008 Hitch published God is not great.  He built on a brave and noble tradition dating back to at least Lucretius. This broadside all faiths was an enthralling book written in his characteristic lucid and lively prose. His book was effectively pro hereseus and was a bestseller.It was acclaimed by his friends Professor Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Stephen Fry.

Atheist did not describe Hitch. He was an anti-theist. He said it would be woeful if gods did exist. He called the notion that we were under divine superintendence ‘a spiritual North Korea.’

Although the Roman Pontiff was one of Hitch’s main targets Hitch liked to pontificate himself. Some found him increasingly arrogant and boorish. He could be condescending.

By that time Hitch was a regular on US chat shows. His thought provoking and aggressive style made him a fabulous guest. He took no prisoners. He refused to accord respect to charlatans like Reverend Jerry Falwell. The rest of America seemed to conform to what was for many a false grief for one of the most loathsome specimens in the public sphere. When Falwell died, Hitchens denounced the pastor as ‘a Chaucerian fraud’ and described the man’s ‘carcass’ being found on the bathroom floor. Hitch gave a broadside to Falwell’s memory. He rightly noted that Falwell has become a multimillionaire through preaching hatred towards other races and faiths as well as by befooling his naïve and semi-literate acolytes into handing him their hard-earned lucre. Falwell’s mostly working class stock were duped into giving him their salaries whilst he lived in opulence. It was all part of the prosperity gospel. It was a sick inversion of the message of Jesus.

When it came to debates with people of faith, Hitch did not suffer fools gladly. Religious bigotry was greeted with a fusillade from Hitchens. He came across as a conceited and confessed to vanity though not of a physical kind.

Groupies increasingly surrounded Hitchens. Perhaps this adoration went to his head. He became snootier.

Hitch’s support for the liberation of Iraq had won him admirers in the Republican Party. As Salman Rushdie said, Hitch’s anti-religious crusade (irony intended) saved him from the American right.

Salman Rushdie was awarded a knighthood by Her Majesty the Queen. Salman accepted the gong. Hitch forgave Sir Salman for accepting the knighthood. Usually Hitch despised people for accepting such honours because he hated the British system of honours. The knighthood was one in the eye for Islamism. On that ground, Hitch welcomed this recognition of his friend’s literary achievements.

In debate Hitch was a modern Quintilian. Hitch was often asked to debate on television. He debated against the British far left anti-Zionist George Galloway. Hitch dubbed Galloway ‘a publicist for the Ba’ath party.’ Galloway’s ad personam was about Hitch’s drinking. Christopher H also debated against a man whom he exalted: Tony Blair. Christopher even debated against his own brother Peter Hitchens. Peter produced a refutation of God is not great entitled The rage against God.

Hitch would slaughter and pillage his way through a debate. When someone complained that he or she was offended he would say that this was surplusage.

Despite continuing to despise Hillary Clinton, Hitch recognised that she might one day be the lesser of two evils. He said the time might come when he even he would cast his ballot in her favour.

Towards death

In June 2010 Hitch had to tell his audience in his own words: non sum quam eram. He had been diagnosed with cancer of the throat. Decades of tobacco consumption had caused this. He then came out with the world’s most understated anti-smoking warning: smoking might not be advisable.

The cancer advanced to stage 4 with grim rapidity. There is no stage 5. Hitch decided to meet his fate with his typical stoicism.

In his inimitable and novel style Hitch said he would ‘do death’ actively. He went on striving for the causes to which he was committed to the very end. In equanimous and pensive mood he reflected that as a father his final duty was to get out of the way. He was the master of the metaphor saying death was like being told that the party is over or even worse: the party is still going on but you have to leave.

Hitch had every treatment there was. But soon it was apparent that his fight against cancer was the losing battle. He noted that some of his Christian nemeses gloated that it was the organ that had blasphemed so much – the throat – that had been stricken. On the other hand, he observed that some Christians held a day of prayer asking that he be healed.

The guru of the enlightenment went on a speaking tour even in his last few weeks. He took to the podium whilst his strength held.

Mortality is Hitch’s book on meeting death. He said death is nothing to be afraid of. His stoicism and equanimity as he looked eternity in the eye was awe striking. His cognizance that his dissolution was imminent did nothing to diminish his contumely or asperity towards the parties of god. One of his essays on death is entitled Nothing to be afraid of.

As his strength waned Hitch’s friends in London organised a farewell ceremony to him.  It was an Intelligence Squared event. Thousands gathered to hear Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, Sean Penn, Christopher Buckley, Salman Rushdie and others pay tribute to Hitch’s magnificent and peerless contribution to the battle for free expression. Hitch joined by video link from the United States.

Christians often like to boast that the doughtiest atheists convert on their deathbeds. Hitch assured people that he would do no such thing and any such tale would be a vile slur on his good name. He was cogent almost to the very end. He faced his dissolution with philosophic detachment.

As Hitch lay dying, he lamented that he could not valorously lay down his life in a noble cause. His friends and family gathered to reminisce with him. But he also looked forward. He eschewed melancholy and self-pity.

In December 2011 Hitch was in a hospital in Texas. Cancer finally got the better of him. Bizarrely, his last words were, ‘’capitalism, downfall.’’ His boon companion, Salman Rushdie, tweeted with admirable pith, ‘’A great voice has fallen silent.’’

Legacy

No obsequy was held. Therefore, there could be no proper valediction for him. I feel it was wrong of him to deprive his countless fans of a chance to reach closure.

It was a pity that Christopher did not live two days longer to hear that one of the people he reviled most had died. That was the North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Il.

Christopher Hitchens is a flawed hero. I certainly do not concur with his views on all issues. But the man had manifold virtues and virtuosities. Hitch’s oeuvre has clarity and pace. It is never banal nor are his phrases ever trite. His stentorian timbre roared forth his views with admirable eclat. He shall be remembered as an orator and a polemicist.

I heartily recommend so many of his tomes. Why Orwell Matters is one of them.

I wish to read the complete works of Hitchens. His name shall be known for centuries.

As we are under sustained assault from the forces of irrationality and deceit, we need a Hitch now more than ever.

Just over two centuries ago John Keats was summoned to the eternal auditorium in the sky. Though he died at the age of only 25 he is among the most jubilated poets of all time. He was and is the superlative syllable stringer. John Keats was blessed with the most inappreciable literary gifts. What is it about Keats’ oeuvre that accounts for the remarkable durability of his verses? I was introduced to his astounding oeuvre as a schoolboy. My admiration and adulation for this spectacular poet has never left me. His mind teemed like a river full of migrating salmon.

For my money, Keats is the poet who symbolises the romantic movement better than any other. He died younger than the others and his all too brief life was touched by grief again and again. Though his life was maudlin, yet he never despaired. He sought solace and pleasance in even the most mundane things. John Keats had an uncanny knack of turning the unremarkable into something splendiferous. His sublime intellect has thrilled millions down the centuries. His refined sentimentality made for a teeming imagination and enabled him to compose some of the most exquisite and artful poems in any language. He composed panegyrics to nature that have seldom been equalled. That is why his name is illumined in eternal glory.

By the age of 20 John Keats’s had seen both his parents die, his younger brother die and John himself was terminally ill. It may appear to be a life swathed in deepest sable. Despite the many bitter blows from fate, John was ever upbeat and resilient. His consciousness of his mortality made him ever more productive.

Keats’ verse is a palimpsest of classical education overlaid with the tropes of the Romantic Movement. An almost childlike sincerity shines through his masterful verses. The lucidity and originality of his work has few peers. Read his poems and you shall find yourself possessed by the ‘blithe spirit’ that his limned. Dip into his verses and you shall ‘breathe serene’ as he put it.

John Keats was born at London in 1795. The family at first lived in a house near where the Barbican Tube Station now stands. The house is no longer extant. John was to spend all but the last 6 months of his life in London. His father ran a livery stables and inn. John was one of four surviving children. John’s brief life was tinged by grief again and again. When John was small his father perished from falling from his steed. The family was middle class but in straitened circumstances. An education was knocked into him. He was quick at his books and soon had the better of Latin and Ancient Greek accidence. The classics fructified in his ever-fertile mind. John drunk deep the inspiration of Ancient Mediterranean cultures. John’s schoolmasters were agog at their pupil’s uncommon gifts. Back then pupils were taught the art of scansion. He honed the craft of word weaving.

By his mid-teens Keats was composing sublime and elegant poesy. Few pieces of his juvenilia have survived. As an adolescent he was afflicted by more and deeper anxieties than usual. The familial financial situation was perennially insecure. His mother rewed but her second marriage was cataclysmic. Within weeks she and John’s stepfather separated though they never divorced. Divorced as a very lengthy, expensive and ignominious process back then for both the sinned against as well as the sinning.

When John was only 14 his mother died. He was left to care for his younger sister and two younger brothers. Despite his bereavements he did not dwell on tristful themes. His poesy is replete with vitality and buoyancy.

Another disadvantage that beset young John was that he was also decidedly lacking in stature. In an age when most men were 5’6’’ or so he was 5’2’’. He felt his smallness made most girls unapproachable. His fiscal challenges did not add to his allure as a suitor.

In his late teens Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary (pharmacist) after a few years he qualified in that profession. He considered upgrading his qualifications to become a physician. This would have assured him a handsome income. In the end he decided against it. His true talent lay in composing verses. He wanted to throw all his time and endeavour into his first love: poesy. That was to be his vocation. Little did he know how limited his time was to be.

At the age of 18 a volume entitled ‘Poems by John Keats’ was published. It sold a respectable few hundred copies. That was very creditable for a first publication especially as he had no connections. For a literary debut it is sans pareil. The literary genius was on his way to achieving immortality.

Around this age John was smitten by his neighbour, Fanny Brawne. But her family disapproved of him. He was not affluent, and they thought he had few prospects. They did not want their daughter marrying beneath her.

As a member of the Romantic movement, Keats rejoiced in the most ordinary ordinary things: in plants, in trees, valleys, the wind and wine. Others would pass these things by without a second glance. Keats took more than solace from the natural world and unremarkable occurrences. He gleaned gladness and inspiration from the seemingly quotidian. Though his life was grief-laden and lovelorn he did not dwell on heartrending themes. His work is astonishingly free of plaintive verses. The epistolary evidence of John Keats’ is of a vivacious and buoyant character. He was no tragedian.

The world was in turmoil as Keats rose to manhood. The Napoleonic Wars were fought all across Europe and back again. France clubbed small nations insensible. From New Orleans to Nepal, the British were fighting. The Royal Navy battled the French upon the seas and oceans. Battles, sieges, spoliations and revolutions raged. In the British Isles there was radicalism in the air. Some preached revolution. The reaction was hellbent on crushing the life out of radicals. Some were vindicators of abolition of servitude. Britain was ruled by a lunatic monarch and his comically corpulent son. All this seems to have passed Keats’ by. When it came to politics he glazed over. He reacted to the upheaval with complete indifference.

By the age of 20 Keats was making waves in literary London. He moved in the same circles as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Leigh Hunt. He even more William Wordsworth once though Wordsworth was a generation older than him. Wordsworth was impressed with Keats’s work. Wordsworth was a trailblazer for the romantic movement in the British Isles. He was almost a father figure for the junior members of the movement. But he was an 18^th century father: distant and cold.

Though John Keats knew these other romantic poets, he was not as wealthy as them. He was not afflicted with the same guilt that they were. He was also indifferent to their political opinions.

Greece was Keats muse. Alas and alack, he never visited Hellas. The Napoleonic Wars and his chronic impecuniosity precluded a trip the cradle of European civilisation.

In 1818 Keats had his annus mirabilis. This fruitful year built his reputation. What spurred him to be so productive? It might have been his increasing cognizance of mortality. That year his brother died of tuberculosis at the age of 19. It was a shot across Keats’ bows. John himself coughed up dark blood that year. With his education in materia medica he wrote that he knew it to be arterial blood. His days were numbered. Knowing a cold and silent grave was not far off he set to the task of offering something to posterity. From that moment on his feathered quill was seldom still.

Residing by Hampstead Heath, John composed five of his six odes. The house was owned by an Old Etonian barrister named Richard Woodhouse. Woodhouse was in bewildered awe of Keats’ unequalled verses.

Some of Keats’ work is about classical themes. Endymion is a reworking of an Ancient Greek work about a shepherd who has had a spell cast on him causing him to sleep for centuries. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever/ It will never pass away into nothingness…’ is it overture.

Some of Keats’s verse delight in simplicity. For instance, Faery song is a charmingly spare, lyrical and almost infantile ditty:

Shed no tear. Oh shed no tear!/ The flower will bloom another year/ Overheard/ Look overhead!/ Amongst the flowers/ White and red./ Weep no more/ Oh weep no more/ The young bud sleeps in the root’s white core/ Dry your eyes/ Oh dry your eyes!/ For  I was taught in paradise/ to ease the breast of melodies.

The poem goes on to be a valediction. Perhaps it was prospective of his own impending demise. ‘Adieu, adieu/ I fly adieu/ I vanish in the heaven’s blue/ Adieu. Adieu.’

The verses that Keats wrote are unfailingly blithe, charming and splendiferous. He was ever mindful, as poets seemed not to be, that the chief distinction between poesy and prose is that the former is made to be declaimed.

Keats composed some magnificent and challenging pieces. His reputation is built largely on his resplendent odes. Many consider ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’ to be his masterwork. He addresses this praise poem to an ancient artefact and lauds it as being more expressive of past glories than anything a poet could write:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

       A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape

       Of deities or mortals, or of both,

               In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

Think of these lines being whispered by a mortally ill 23 year old, and you will catch their cadences.

Bear in mind that Keats was writing in an epoch when ’ye’, ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ were still in common usage. His verses were flawlessly constructed in terms of meter and rhyme scheme. Yet there was never any strained wording.

For my money ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is his most stupendous accomplishment: In the first stanza he writes;

…light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.       

The reversal of the adjective noun order gets the attention of readers though this was not unusual at the time. He accented the ‘e’ of winged for the sake of meter. A dryad is a living spirt of the trees in Ancient Greek theogony.

The second verse of the poem is surely the most splendidly evocative description of wine of all time:

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South!
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Though the work is packed with classical allusions he bears his erudition lightly. These were widely recognised at the time. In fact, his references to mythology were relatively few and not abstruse for the era. He succeeded in putting into verse the seemingly inexpressible mental sensation of imbibing alcohol.

It was an inestimable privilege for me to stand under a tree outside the house in Hampstead where he wrote this poem. The tree that stands now is probably a descendant of the original.

John Keats was capable of composing a poem on a well-worn theme without ever being trite. He avoided the weary cliché. His use of imagery was extraordinarily inventive. His poesy had verve and bounciness.

In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats wrote ‘tender is the night.’ This gave F Scott FitzGerald the title of his novel.

Later in Ode to a Nightingale, Keats writes of how it is not worth living to a sorrowful and troubled old age:

the weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;

He composed this in May 1819. He was 23 and already had tuberculosis. He was growing ever more conscious of his impending demise. That is why it was worth persuading himself that living long was not to be sought after. As he sputtered up blood, he was redoubled in his conviction that he would not become a doctor. He must through all his passion and his little remaining life into his poetical works. It would take another three years to become a doctor. As we now know he had only two years left to live. The fatally stricken poet wisely chose not to squander his remaining years studying for a profession that he could not live to join.

Towards the end of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ he wrote ‘adieu, adieu!’ He was preparing to take leave of this mortal coil.

In his ‘Ode to sleep’ Keats encapsulates the wonderment of slumber in lines which must be susurrated; ‘Oh soft embalmer of the midnight still!’

There is a freshness and a vitality to Keats’ work that is seldom surpassed. Though he addressed some well-worn themes he did so with exceptional insight and was never hackneyed.

The poesy of John Keats did not meet universal approbation.  The Irish Tory MP John Wilson Croker reviewed Keats poems in the Quarterly Review. Croker panned Keats’ work as jejune. He scorned the young poet as half-educated. Keats was contemptuously said to be part of the Cockney School: a circle of poets who had not attended Varsity. John Wilson Croker later coined the term ‘the Conservative Party’.

John Keats composed some light-hearted verses. Perhaps his most unserious is a playful poem entitled ‘A song about myself’,

There was a naughty boy,
A naughty boy was he,
He would not stop at home,
He could not quiet be-
He took
In his knapsack
A book
Full of vowels
And a shirt …

So he followed his nose

To the north

To the north

He followed his nose

To the north…

The cheeky little poem showed he was capable of writing playful pieces for children. Plain though this poem is there is a certain sparkle to it. He never married and had no children. Therefore, it was the wains of others who were reared on a wholesome diet of Keats.

Keats composed many more awestriking lines. They are too numerous to cite then all here. I can offer but a small sample of his splendid work. He was incapable of mediocrity. He addressed himself to common themes but always found an original angle. John studied famous poets closely but did not imitate them. He had found his own voice as a schoolboy.

The poems of Keats are fabulously evocative. His use of imagery and other literary devices is unequalled. The lines’ enjambment succeeds so splendidly. The themes are gorgeously enmeshed. You may find your mind aswim with wonderment at his ineffable and peerless brilliancy. The work is magnificently memorable and the marvellous musicality is enchanting. His euphonious and felicitous verses are a rare delight. Keats cared deeply not just for the signification of his words but for their sound. Read his work and you shall be entranced and spellbound by his heavenly poems. Dull would he be of soul who could read his poesy and not find himself carried on ‘the viewless wings of poesy’ as Keats himself put it. A freshness and an audacity pervades his poems. His lines shall fill you with an unexampled rapture. The heavenly lyricism and unimprovable diction of his verse’s accounts for his exceptional popularity.

The complete works of John Keats consists of a couple of hundred poems. By the standards of the day none of his poems were unusually long. Endymion is but a couple of thousand lines, but many poets composed poems of several thousand lines back then. He did not write prose. However, there are many letters by him that are extant. This epistolary evidence is the basis for biographies of the stricken young writer.

As his medical condition disimproved he decided to take ship to Italy. There was no hope of beating consumption. However, in a more clement climate his life might at least be extended, with luck, for a couple of years. In September 1820 Keats took ship for the Mediterranean. It was his only ever trip out of England. As the ship rolled and pitched upon the foaming deep it was torment for John in his condition. He wrote, ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die/ To cease upon a midnight without pain.’ Accompanied by a doctor friend he landed in Italy a few weeks later.

There they travelled overland to Rome. Because of Keats increasing frailty they had to travel gingerly. Why did he choose to go to the Eternal City? Further south the warmer and even drier climate would have agreed more with his far from robust constitution. Perhaps John elected to go to Rome as he had spent his childhood days reading Latin and learning of the city’s former glories.

At school John had learnt a little Italian. He probably never thought he would have a chance to use it. It was taught as a literary not a conversational language. To his chagrin he was so frail that he could scarcely leave the house. His last few letters are scarcely lachrymose. His fortitude in the face of death unmanned even his doctor friend. Only in the final hours did Keats’ mood grow tenebrous.

Not being a religious man, John did not have the consolations of faith. He does not seem to have believed that he was going to an afterlife. He fantasised in a last letter, ‘I think I shall be remembered among the English poets after my death.’ However, he gave strict instructions on what to inscribe on his headstone. His name was not to appear. Was his modesty or even self-effacement? His gravestone reads:

 ‘This grave /contains /all that was mortal of a /young English poet /who on his deathbed/ in the bitterness of his heart/ at the maliciousness of his enemies /desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone:/ ‘’Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’’/ 24 February 1821.

The headstone was to be adorned with the image of lyre. That is because in Greece poems were declaimed to the accompaniment of a lyre. Keats’ works were lyrical.

The mention of Keats’ foes reminds us how he triumphed over them a thousand-fold. Who now remembers the name of any of his enemies?

John and his friend took a house by the Spanish Steps. His condition worsened drastically. Sooner than anyone had foreseen the angel of death hovered over him. John Keats faced his doom with rare stoicism. Such was his agony that he welcomed death as a blissful deliverance. His last utterance was ‘Thank God it has come!’

On 24 February 1821 John Keats drew his last breath. His death mask was made. This is now in the possession of Eton College. A small funeral cortege bore his body to Il Cimiterio Acattolica just inside the southern walls of Rome. There he has lain ever since. He is endowed with eternal youth. Think of his surpassing verses as literary elixir.

News travelled slowly in those days. It took a few weeks before Shelley, who was also in Italy, was informed of his friend’s death. P B Shelley found it a very bitter blow. Shelley mourned his friend by composing the most stupendous elegy of all time: Adonais. It opens ‘I weep for Adonais; he is dead.’ He was calling his friend an Adonis but for the sake of scansion added a vowel.

By the time of John Keats’ death his poems had sold but 200 copies. He is now one of the most widely read poets in any language. A stave of Keats is just the tonic you need when in a melancholy mood.

When Oscar Wilde was in self-imposed exile after his release from Reading Gaol he journeyed to La Citta Eterna. There he visited Keats’ final resting place. He was moved to compose a poem at the grave of a fellow literary martyr.

John Keats’ speaks to every succeeding generation. His message of the joy of the natural world is universal. His vivacity and mind-boggling verbal intelligence shall always be appreciated. Though he was diminutive he is a colossus.

I planned to visit his grave again this year on the bicentenary of his death. Beneath my feet there would have been a richer dust concealed. I wished to declaim his verses to him. As though he could reach out to me from centuries ago and commune with me. His short and magnific life was tragically short. He accomplished more in his lease of years than a million men do in an ordinary lifespan.

John Keats has achieved literary apotheosis. His place in literature is assured. The glee he has brought to untold millions of many generations has won him a seat on Mount Olympus.

Progress – define it objectively. Why do people dislike progress?

Progress is a positive change. If it is objective it is about things getting better in a way that is provable and therefore no reasonable person can disagree. This would include things such as extending life expectancy, persuading more people to give up smoking, reducing global warming, closing the hole in the Ozone layer, reducing the murder rate, reducing the suicide rate or lifting people out of absolute poverty. These changes would be progress because they are aimed at preserving life. It is human instinct to remain alive which is why we eat and drink. Those who try to end their lives are usually judged to be mentally ill.

There can be progress which is not necessarily a moral improvement. Someone who attains better scores in exams than before is making progress. Someone who achieves faster times in running is making progress. This can be demonstrated objectively because there is a metric to do this.

We could make people live longer and this could be proved through data. However, it is debatable whether this is a desirable aim. The pension system might collapse. Is it worth living many years bed bound or in a permanent vegetative state? The health service would then have to expend so many of its resources extending the lives of geriatrics. Therefore, the younger generations’ health would be neglected.

Economic progress is about enriching ourselves. This can be proven through looking at Gross Domestic Product. GDP is sometimes misleading as it might hide a huge gulf between the affluent and the indigent. The United States has a very high GDP but that is because it has many billionaires even though 20% of the people are in poverty. Economic progress is not always to be welcomed even when it means greater wealth even for the poorest. Car ownership has become the norm in highly developed countries. But this brought with it more pollution, more noise and more traffic jams. It became difficult to find a parking space. Furthermore, green space had to be concreted over to build more roads and car parks. Some see all this so-called progress as a pity. Some economic progress could be undesirable. If we concentrated on providing for the needs of the poorest this would increase the sum of human happiness more so than furnishing the already affluent with superfluous material goods.

Economic progress can lead to urban sprawl. It might also cause small family owned businesses to go bust. The tranquility of a close knit community can be wrecked by a behemoth business. For instance, a hypermarket out of town can undercut a corner shop because the small business cannot compete on prices with a hypermarket that buys goods in bulk. Mass scale tourism has ruined the quaintness and placidity of remote fishing villages for instance. The people in the village would become wealthier due to the influx of tourists. But is that worth it? That is a subjective issue. Poverty, not just development, is also ugly.

Objectively demonstrable progress is something which a datum can prove as adumbrated hereinbefore. This is in stark contrast to something subjective which is a matter of personal preference or ideology. The victory of a certain political party is hailed as progress by some but seen as retrograde by others. Social changes will be lauded as emancipation by some but disparaged as decadence by others. Gender and racial equality can be shown through statistics. However, some bigots dislike these trends. Therefore such contentious changes which do not have a statistical basis or an uncontentious reason for calling them progress can be objectively identified as progress.

Progress involves change. Some people dislike change. Those who are small ‘c’ conservatives tend to be sceptical about change. There are reactionaries who are opposed to all modernisation and indeed wish to turn the clock back to the way that things used to be centuries ago. Progress is threatening to people who are set in their ways. Those of a very traditional cast of mind wish to continue current practices. This can be irrational: being overlay attached to doing things the way they have always been done just for the sake of it. Not all traditions are worthy of automatic respect.

Technological progress can put people out of work. Some people are Luddites and are against scientific and technological progress. People have opposed vaccines from the time of the smallpox vaccine in the 1780s. To this day we have people who disbelieve in vaccines including for COVID-19. There are people who think it is playing God or interfering with nature. Such irrationality has still not disappeared despite people being more educated and less superstitious than they were in the 18th century.

Some people were against trains and cars. New fangled items upset people of a very backward looking mindset. Those who are made unemployed by new technology have a logical reason to oppose it. Within 20 years we will probably have no bus drivers, taxi drivers, lorry drivers, aeroplane pilots, helicopter pilots or ship pilots. All the people who currently do these jobs will need to be found jobs.

Technological changes that save labour are progress. We can prove this because less human effort is required and people can do things they enjoy rather than work that they do not always enjoy. Furthermore, to stick with the example of self-driving vehicles, it is human error that causes crashes almost every time. Automatic cars and other vehicles do not become intoxicated, they do not lose their tempers, they do not fall asleep at the wheel and they cannot break the speed limit. They are very efficient. Therefore self-driving vehicles and self-flying planes will keep us safer.

There are some irrational suspicions of new technology. Some people simply have a knee jerk reaction against innovation. Elderly people often find it hard to adapt to new technology and modes of thought.

In conclusion, progress is generally to be welcomed. It can be objectively demonstrated through data which will show an improvement that any right thinking person would celebrate. There will be some downsides to these changes and those impacted as well as ultra-conservative people will dislike these changes.

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There is more to healing than the application of scientific knowledge

Write a unified essay in which you address the following:

Briefly define ‘scientific knowledge’. Explain how it might be argued that medical treatment that is not wholly based on scientific knowledge is worthless. Discuss whether there can be approaches to healing that are valid but not amenable to scientific experiment. 

Healing is recovering after an illness or injury. Scientific knowledge is knowledge about the natural world and human inventions. This includes biology, chemistry and physics. Such knowledge is garnered through observation and experiments to test hypotheses. An experiment needs to be a fair test and to be repeated on many occasions to guard against the possibility of a rogue result. Scientists must be circumspect about leaping to conclusions. Scientific findings are published in peer reviewed scholarly journals. Scientific knowledge needs to be certain or near certain before we call it knowledge at all. However, no science is immutable. It has been overturned before and could be again. For instance, people thought that they knew that the world was the centre of the universe but from the 16th century onwards it became accepted that the universe is heliocentric.

Some argue that medical treatment need not be exclusively based on scientific knowledge. There are people like Prince Charles who say that homeopathic medicine is equally valid. Likewise some favour traditional Chinese medicine or ayurvedic medicine. However, these so-called schools of medicine are not regarded by the medical profession as real medicine. Medicine involves developing drugs through several years of double blind tests with full data sets published. Medicine has to be sure that positive outcomes for patients are not simply consequent upon coincidence or extraneous factors. That is why in a drug experiment there is a control group which is given a placebo.

The Prince of Wales was an advocate for making homeopathy available on the National Health Service. However, the medical profession generally reacted negatively saying this was a footling waste of time and would be a diversion of scarce funds and resources.

It is said that ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine are contumeliously dismissed by Western medicine for Eurocentric reasons. Some Westerners find it hard to accept that Asia was centuries ahead of Europe in terms of medicine.

Faith can help people live longer and recover faster. Religious people often attribute this to divine intervention. However, this is probably because religious people believe that they will live longer. This can make them actually do so because their morale is high and they are more socially engaged by membership of a religious community and they therefore tend to be physically active as much as they walk to their place of worship. Religion is not open to experiment. It is a matter of faith not science. If a religion could be proved to be true on a scientific level then it would not require any faith to believe in it any more than we need faith to believe in gravity or photosynthesis. Religion and science are said to be non-overlapping magisteria by religious apologists.

People cite having friends and a loving family as being positively correlated with making a swift and full recovery from illnesses and after operations. But this could be said to have a scientific basis in that people with a loving family and many friends have higher morale and are hugged. Data proves that this stimulates endorphins and boosts the immune system thereby speeding up the healing process. They say that laughter is the best medicine: again this is because it stimulates the immune system.

Non-scientific approaches to medicine are ridiculed by many physicians as nonsensical. These non-scientific approaches are seen as at best a waste of time and money but at worst a dangerous delusion. Some patients might go to a so-called homeopathic doctor rather than a real doctor. If homeopathy, ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine could prove that they work to a scientific level then they would be accepted as part of real medicine by the scientific community. They are not amenable to experiment.

It is true that ayurvedic medicine and homeopathic medicine sometimes seem to work. But that could just be good luck. Perhaps the patient was going to get better anyway and the ayurvedic medicine or homeopathy made no difference. Alternatively, it could be a case of mind over matter. If the patient believes that the homeopathy or ayurvedic medicine would heal him or her then it does so because it is a case of mind over matter. Much of recovery is dependent on morale. That is also why many elderly people die in January since they have willed themselves to live past New Year.

In conclusion, it is true that healing can be assisted by things that are not based on scientific knowledge. However, this is applicable only in a minority of cases and is seldom determinative in itself. Medicine should not become distracted by non-scientific doctrines and practices.

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People are often motivated to deny the existence of problems if they disagree with the solutions to those problems.

Explain what you think is meant by the statement. Present a counter-argument. To what extent do you agree with the statement?

The statement suggests that people sometimes fail to face up to problems if the solution to the problem is deeply unattractive. There are numerous examples. For instance it is scientifically proven that climate change is happening and that it is at least partially anthropogenic and is harming us. The solution involves changes to our lifestyles that many find unpalatable. For example, we will have to drive fewer cars, drive smaller cars, drive electric cars, fly less frequently, insulate our houses more, live in smaller houses and wear more clothes at home in the winter. This involves reducing our quality of life and making some consumer products less affordable. It also means we will have less convenience. All this is very unattractive to some people. It will also hit the profitability of powerful vested interests such as airlines, the automotive industry and hydrocarbon companies. Therefore they are minded to de-emphasise or even deny the anthropogenic aspect of climate change, to downplay the injurious effects of climate change or even to claim that climate change is not occurring at all.

People tend to tell themselves something they can tolerate. They say that the truth always hurts. It does not always hurt but sometimes it does.

An obese person might refuse to recognise that he is obese. A drastic diet and an exercise regime might be unbearable for this person. Therefore, he is wont to be in denial about his medical condition.

When a doctor tells a patient that she has been diagnosed with a serious or even terminal illness the patient sometimes refuses to accept it at first. This is indicative or a person being unwilling to confront the hideous and frightening truth.

People who are addicts often refuse to recognise their condition for what it is and seek help. Acknowledging the condition is the first step on the road to recovery. An addict usually does not wish to admit that he or she has an addiction because the word addict is opprobrious but also because the concomitant consequences of addiction are harmful and sometimes even fatal. This is applicable to drug abuse, alcoholism and nicotine addiction. Beating addiction often requires rehabilitation, changing habits, breaking destructive relationship cycles, moving to a new place, getting a new job plus the anguish and physical pain of withdrawal symptoms. This can involve delirium tremens. As the way to beat addiction is hard the addict would prefer not to face the truth. Addicts tend to be prisoners of the present: they cannot think in long time scales.

Even when people acknowledge a problem and admit that the only solution is going to hurt they usually delay moving to that solution. We delay the unattractive. This is true of fiscal matters now.

A counterargument is that people commonly invent non-existent problems. They will demand expensive, painful and onerous solutions to these imaginary problems. Munchausen’s Syndrome is an example wherein a patient presents himself or herself to a doctor claiming to be afflicted with certain ailments. He or she might describe all the symptoms and even have faked some of them. This person can be very convincing and persistent but scans and blood tests can prove that the claim is bogus. Some people like to feel like martyrs. There is Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy wherein a parent claims that his or her child has an illness and reports all sorts of symptoms. The parent might convince the child that he or she is suffering from it.

In conclusion, this essay agrees with the title statement to a very considerable extent. It is easily observable that people seldom face up to an unappealing truth. That takes immense amounts of wisdom, moral courage and objectivity. Sadly, all too many people are subjective, unduly emotive and suffer from unwisdom.

The United States is controlled by the military-industrial complex. You might think this is an off the wall conspiracy theory. Who came up with this idea? Was it a loony leftie? No, it was a Republican president. In his farewell address President Dwight D Eisenhower warned the American people to be on their guard against the overweening influence of the military industrial. President Eisenhower’s valedictory words about the threat posed to democracy by the military-industrial complex could have come from the words of an official Soviet publication.

What is the military industrial complex? It is a circle of military manufacturing companies, the military, mercenaries (er… sorry… I mean ‘private military companies’), hawkish journalists, bellicose politicians and war mongering lobbyists. Another way to put it is it is the war profiteers. The military manufacturing companies want to make fat profits. They pay lobbyists to persuade politicians to vote major contracts through Congress. Military manufacturing companies are canny enough to manufacture a product in as many states as possible. Sometimes if it is something highly complex like a aeroplane they can make the wings in one state, the cockpit in another, the engine in another etc…. so that senators and representatives from a multitude of states have a vested interest in voting through this defense contract. It is pork barrel politics at its most pigheaded and porcine. Journalists for war mongering channels such as Fox ‘News’ become cheer leaders for bombing brown people. Politicians receive bribes, I mean, donations to vote through these contracts. Military officers once they leave military service can find a comfortable stable as a lobbyists, journalist, or executive at a military manufacturing company. Many of the people in the non-military parts of the war profit industry are part-time members of the US military. You might be a politician who is in the US Army Reserve or a journalist who is in the National Guard etc… There is a revolving dor between the various sections of the military-industrial complex. If you are a politician who loses your place in Congress you can become a lobbyist, journalist of military manufacturing executive.

Being voted out is increasingly unlikely. The United States has got gerrymandering down to a fine art by packing and cracking. The United States is the country that gifted the world with the term gerrymander. The expression is derived from the name of a Governor of Massachusetts and Vice-President of the United States: Elbridge Gerry. He drew district boundaries shaped like a salamander. Electoral district boundaries are drawn with the express intention of maximizing partisan advantage. This is about distributing your support as efficiently as possible and your opponent’s support as inefficiently as possible. Packing means concentrating your support in a district such that you can be confident that you will win. You do not want just over 50% of the people in the district to support your party. That is too close. There are the vagaries of individual candidates, the economic cycle, turnout and so forth. 51% would be too close for comfort. You want about 55% of the people in the district to be your supporters bearing in mind that there are only two parties of serious significance in the United States. The fact that there are only two parties of note in such a gigantic and diverse country is a grave indictment of the United States. You should not have too much over 55% of the people on your side in any one electoral district. That would be overkill and waste votes. Conversely, you want your opponents support to be close to 100% in other districts. This means that his or her support is squandered by being so heavily concentrated in one electoral district. You cannot prevent your opponent winning any representation therefore seek to minimize it by keeping it corralled in a small number of electoral districts.

Because the flagrantly partisan nature of re-districting in the United States most electoral districts are non-competitive. The minor party does not stridently campaign in most districts. Once the Republicans have won a district several times the Democrats there become demoralized and are unlikely to bother vote. Others move away. Therefore, a district where the Republicans won 55% of the vote several times consecutively turns into one where they won 65% regularly. The same is true in Democrat held constituencies. A very small number of districts changes hands at each election. In the so-called blue wave election in 2018 the Democrats gained under 10% of the districts in the House of Representatives.

There are tens of millions of praiseworthy Americans who recognized that much has gone deeply wrong in the United States. The twisted cult of militarism stalks the land. This is a far cry from the vision of the Founding Fathers. They rightly recognized that an overmighty military could be a weapon in the hands of a tyrant. It was against excessive military spending and the undue power of army officers over civilians that the American Revolution started. That is not to mention the hefty impositions levied to pay for all this. The Founding Fathers considered restricting the US Army to 5 000 men. It is perhaps a pity that they did not.

We all know that the US is a military behemonth. Twas not always thus. Until 1941 the US military was decidedly small. The US Navy was formidable since the United States has a very long littoral. Moreover, she possessed islands in the Pacific and the US had made the Caribbean little more than an American lake. But the US Army and the US Marine Corps were not large, not well-equipped and not highly paid. The Second World War was to change that beyond recognition. Until the 1940s most Americans were wisely suspicious of the notion of a bloated military. It was not the American way. They did not want to be lorded over by martinets. America’s boast was that it had no compulsory military service. In so many other nations men were obliged to serve in the armed forces. America being a free country did not compel men to do so. But from 1941 the United States jettisoned some of these most estimable mores.

There are plenty of anti-militarists in America. There are courageous voices raised against the excessive and undue influence of the military-industrial complex. People complain about the heavy taxes which burden then to support the military juggernaut. They are rightly alarmed by the deficit which balloons apace. Why are these voices so seldom heard? The military-industrial complex will not tolerate such dissent.

If the military-industrial complex is to be sustained what does America need? In a word: enemies. The war industry has to invent bogymen if they cannot be found. To some extent that is true with the CIA as well. The war industry is often itching for a war. It would be a pity to be all dressed up and have nowhere to go. If there was no mortal peril what then? Then there would be a serious danger of cutbacks in military spending.

I am not blaming the ordinary Joe who enlists in the US military. Many of the youths who sign up for the US military are escaping poverty. They know little of world politics. ‘There’s not to reason why/ There’s but to do and die…’ There are different sorts of personalities in the US military as there are in any other vast organization. Some of them are amiable and others are at least decent.

The blatantly unfair electoral district system calls into question America’s incessantly repeated claim to be the pinnacle of democracy. The US mission to export democracy by cruise missile is hard to credit.

The war profiteers do not want peace breaking out. That would spell doom for their jerk circle. It would suit the war industry if we had Bellum omnium contra omnes.

The US has hundreds of military bases. Many are on the border of the Russian Federation. Russia feels hemmed in, menaced and encircled. Imagine if the Russian Federation concluded a formal military alliance with America’s neighbours. Supposing Russian troops were stationed in Canada, Mexico and the Bahamas? Then Uncle Sam would go apoplectic. When Soviet troops were stationed in Cuba in 1961 the Americans felt very threatened. Cuba had the absolute right to form a defensive alliance with another sovereign state. The Cubans had good reason to seek Soviet military assistance. They knew that Langley Farm was plotting the overthrow of Cuba’s government.

It is hard to believe that the US is under threat. It defines its security as the insecurity of everyone else. Other nations must be vulnerable to America or else America gets scared.

Some right wing opinion forms have excoriated the military-industrial complex. Pat Buchanan is perhaps the foremost of them. He is the scourge of the welfare-warfare state. He noted that the Democrats started the Spanish American War, the First World War, military interventions in Nicaragua and the Caribbean, the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. However since then Republicans invaded Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The trouble is that Buchanan makes no convincing show of being an isolationist. He served in the Reagan White House. Reagan was one of the most military interventionist presidents of all time. Buchanan excoriates the welfare-warfare state.

What are some of the core propaganda messages of the war profit industry in the US? Muslims are bad. Foreigners are a threat. We must defend our allies. Our allies do not spend enough on weapons so we must spend more. Spend more and more and then eventually we will have permanent peace and be able to cut back on spending.

This peace dividend when the US can afford to slash its military budget never, ever comes. There were some notable reductions under Clinton. But since George W Bush the cost of so called ‘defence’ has spiraled. Washington Rules by Andrew J Bacevich is a searing indictment of the pernicious influence and destructive deeds of the military-industrial complex. Dr Bacevich is a former career US Army officer and writes with immense authority and unsparing clarity in his expose of the profoundly corrupting effect of the war profiteer caucus in Washington DC.

One of the core fallacies indefatigably propagated by the war profiteers is that the United States is ‘the best last hope of earth’. This highly self-flattering notion is genuinely believed by the gullible. Those who fall for this tripe ought to recall that self-praise is no praise. Many Americans labour under the dangerous delusion that it falls to the United States to remake the world in its own image. Turning another country into an imitation of the United States has been America’s mission since 1945. It has often succeeded and seldom failed. The notion that Iraq can be turned into America has been tested to destruction. There is the unspoken arrogant presupposition that Iraqis want to be Americans. This is as preposterously specious as imagining that Americans want to be Iraqis. But in terms of reducing living standards, increasing gun deaths, misogyny, homophobia, racialism, environmental degradation and religious mania the war profiteers have done a decent job of making the US become more like Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

There are a number of glaring contradictions in the war industry’s claims. If America’s allies fail to pull their weight then the US should not defend them.

The US claims to stand for the furtherance of democracy. Yet the US has so often propped up despots, sawdust Caesars, Punjabi Pinochets, and tinpot tyrants. The war industry says that Muslims are evil. But again and again the US has thrown its weight behind Muslim states. These are usually oppressive religious reactionary regimes in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Yemen. Washington has opposed and crushed reformists and moderates in the Muslim world.

The US Department of Defense is a misnomer. Should it be called the Department of Attack? The Department of Invasion and Occupation? Or possibly the Department of Bombing Brown People. Since 1945 US Department of Defense has never defended the United States. The US military is invariably fighting abroad – usually a very long way from home.

There are 700 US Military bases in 131 countries. Who is a threat to whom?

Some pointed questions need to be posed in the United States. America spend 60% of all the money spent on the military in the world. For such a mind blowing sum of money Uncle Sam ought to conquer all before him. Yet time and again the United States has been bested by a puny foe such as the Taliban. Even with the able assistance of NATO allies the United States has been unable to extirpate guerrillas armed only with handheld weaponry. By contrast the United States boasts state of the art military technology. America is always pushing back the frontier of the possible with weaponry. It is proud to invent each new generation of weapon systems.

The United States spends more on the military than the next dozen odd countries combined. Most of those nation states are US allies. Why does the United States have to pay so much for its security? Its higher spend it partly because of higher salaries for its military personnel. In countries less affluent than the US salaries are commensurately lower. China, Pakistan, India and Russia all have gargantuan armies but as the average income in these lands is lower than in the United States so is a soldier’s pay. There is another factor that explains the mind boggling sums that America spends on its armed forces. In a word: welfare. Many Americans fulminate about the supposed wickedry of socialism. They may preach the much vaunted virtues of rugged individualism. A man should stand on his own two feet. People must be subjected to the disciplines of the free market and be self-reliant. Except when it comes to the US military. The US military provides for its people from cradle to grave. Its hospitals treat not only US military personnel but also the immediate family thereof. Once a man or woman has completed military service he or she will be treated by Veterans’ Administration hospitals. The US military provides higher education free of charge as well as housing. Some of this education is germane to the US military’s mission. Some of it is not even tangential to the mission. There are US military officers studying degrees in English at Oxford University. In no wise is this connected to their career. It is staggering that American politicians who shriek about pork and spit blood at the notion of publicly funded tertiary education show such largesse to the US military. The military-industrial complex has managed to con people into believing that profligate spending on the armed forces is patriotic. Retrenchment, living within your means, peace and modesty – these should be regarded as patriotic. Braggadocio, the ostentatious show of patriotism, overspending and militarism ought to be perceived as the vices which they are. The perverse cult of toughness has led to America’s love affair with the gun. The tragic consequences of this deeply unhealthy fixation with firearms play out on America’s streets every day. Chauvinism and firearms make an unpalatable combination but when added to machismo the mixture is lethal.

Do all the US bases abroad actually enhance US security? Or are they provocative? Do they make war more likely not less? And if they do raise the chance of war should they not be closed forthwith?

The US abets injustice and mass murder is deemed unmentionable in Washington. The illegal occupation of Palestine is not called what it is – a crime against humanity.

The Colombian coke kingpin Pablo Escobar was a CIA asset. He eventually outlived his usefulness and was assassinated by the United States. But Escobar taught his American paymasters one thing. His policy was ‘silver or led’. People would be offered a choice. They were either paid by him and therefore worked for him or they would be shot dead. The war profiteers have much the same policy only their attitude is not quite so brutal. Budding politicians in the United States need to accept donations from the war profiteers. If they do then they must be obedient puppets in Congress. If not their political career will be killed before it is even born. The war profiteers have their allies in the media to blackguard anyone gallant enough to tell the unvarnished truth about the baleful work wrought by the war industry. It is a rare voice indeed that is raised against the the war profiteers. The brave souls may be stricken in their bloom by vengeful war mongers. The war industry will not tolerate dissent. The journalists who work their wicked will shall calumniate any politician with the moral decency to decry militarism.

What would happen if the war profiteers had their stranglehold on power broken? The US military budget would be scaled back to a sane level. At the moment the United States spends 6% of GDP on the military. This is 3 times the NATO average. The US would then be able to cut taxes, pay off the national debt and fund excellent public services. Publicly funded healthcare for all would be possible. Publicly funded tertiary education all the way to PhD level would be very possible. A green revolution would be eminently feasible. Teachers and other public servants could be decently paid. Welfare payments to the handicapped, the elderly and jobseekers would be brought up to a humane level.

The war profiteers would not possibly stand for that. We simply cannot have social justice can we? We could not abide paying off the national debt and indeed having a sovereign wealth fund. Free healthcare for all is simply intolerable. The government should only cause death not prevent death. That at least is the outlook of the war industry. Making life better for the average American is inadmissible to the war profiteers. A clean environment with all the health benefits that would follow in its train would be quite unthinkable for the war industry.

Reducing the US military to a sensible level would defuse tense situations in a number of zones. It would lead to a general change in attitude. For all too many in the US the gun is not the last resort but almost the first. This is why the police in the United States demonstrate a deep seated prediliction for shooting dead unarmed black people. The excuse proffered is often ‘I thought he had a gun’. He is allowed to have a gun! The entrenched defenders of police murders of black people tend to be gun nuts. They are those who say that anyone should carry any gun anywhere anytime. They would send five year olds to school with guns and grenades. You think I am joking? Sacha Baron Cohen did a video in 2018 when he interviewed a US gun nut Philip Van Cleave who proposed just that. Van Cleave is not a nobody – he is President of the Virginia Citizens’ Defense League. That is no petty organisation. Its viewpoint is almost mainstream in the United States. These same firearm obsessives then use the excuse that a police officer imagined a black person possessed a gun to say that murdering black people is entirely legal and ethical. It underscores yet again the strong strain of racism that exists among a large section of American society.

The polluters, the racists, the war industry and the robber barons form a tight little circle. This axis of evil is called the Republican Party. Unfortunately, it also finds considerable representation in the Democratic Party too. Sometimes I feat that the United States is past saving.

Permanent war seemed the new normal. However, with the withdrawal from Afghanistan there is a glimmer of hope. Has Uncle Sam learnt a very painful and costly lesson?

If the US cut its military down to size it might think about its prison population. It is well known that the US has the highest prison population per capita in the world. This is the prison-industrial complex. Many of the same factors are as play here as are found in the military-industrial complex. The corrupting effect of political donations is plain to see. If the war profiteers were tackled then the prison profiteers might follow. America might begin to see that violence is not the solution to every problem. Sure some people belong in prison but not three million of them. A third of them are there for drug offences. In some cases this is possession. It was a victimless crime. It was never alleged that the so-called felon did anyone the tiniest bit of harm. How odd that the land of the free should be addicted to making its people unfree.

Doctors should always maintain patient confidentiality and act with probity. Explain what is meant by the above statement. Why might probity be important in a good doctor? Under what circumstances might an honest doctor be justified in revealing patient details in the course of their professional practice?

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Patient confidentiality is the medical ethic which requires physicians to refrain from revealing information about patients to third parties. A doctor has access to a patient’s files and he or she has consultations with a patient. A patient will reveal a lot of highly sensitive personal information. Patients often find it excruciatingly embarrassing to talk about certain issues such as their sex lives or secret drug abuse. A patient must trust a doctor not to disclose the content of these consultations. Moreover, a patient will receive diagnoses and be on a course of treatment. A patient usually does not want everyone to know about this. This information is the patient’s information and he or she may choose to reveal this information or to keep it secret. It is not the doctor’s information and it is not his or her right to reveal this.

Probity is honesty in the widest possible sense. A doctor should refrain from lying to a patient unless absolutely necessary. A doctor should not say things that are literally true but in fact misleading. Doctors have the public trust and it is vital that they do not abuse this trust or undermine trust in the medical profession by a lack of probity. Probity extends to doctors not cheating in their examinations. They must also behave in consonance with the highest Hippocratic principles. That is to say to act disinterestedly in always striving to achieve the best outcome for a patient. A doctor is also required to abide by a patient’s wishes if the patient is an adult of sound mind and it is a non-emergency situation.

Doctors must have regard to the reputation of the medical profession. Probity requires them to avoid bringing the profession into disrepute by dishonest, criminal or other unethical behaviour that is unrelated to their profession. For example, a doctor who racially abuses people away from his practice would be in breach of probity. A doctor who lies to avoid getting points on her licence for speeding in her car is in breach of the requirement of probity. A doctor who takes illegal drugs is also breaching the probity ethic. Serious breaches of probity can lead to being struck off the medical register.

Probity is vital in a good doctor because doctors need to earn the trust and respect of the public. Some patients will not come to a doctor who has a reputation for dishonest and unethical conduct. Some who come to such a doctor will not speak candidly about embarrassing matters.

Under highly unusual circumstances breaking medical confidentiality might be permissible. If a married man tests positive for HIV he should be encouraged to inform his spouse. If he refuses to do so then the doctor will have to do so to reduce the risk that the spouse will contract an incurable and terminal illness. This can only be done for grave illnesses.

In an emergency situation a doctor might have to tell another doctor or a nurse something such as the patient is a haemophiliac. This is so appropriate treatment can be provided. It is not done simply because people want to gossip.

If a patient reveals something indicative of child abuse – whether sexual or physical – then the doctor must inform the police and social services. If he notices that a girl has suffered female genital mutilation then he or she must disclose this even without the consent of the patient. Pursuant to police investigations medically confidential information can be shared with the police if there is a court order to do so.

Even revealing a patient’s age can be a breach of confidentiality. Patients can be very touchy about this.

Doctors can of course disclose confidential medical information with the express permission of patients. That is not a breach of confidentiality. That is a normal thing to do in the course of professional practice.