Historians From The United States

"[There is an] obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so."

"Christopher Lasch explains the process by which the therapeutic segment of the managerial elite win moral acceptance. Despite the fact that its claims to be providing “mental health” were always self-serving and highly subjective, the therapeutic class offered ethical leadership in the absence of shared principles. By defining emotional well-being as both a social good and the overcoming of what is individually and collectively dangerous, the behavioral scientists have been able to impose their absolutes upon the culturally fluid society. In “The True and Only Heaven” Lasch explores the implications for postwar politics of the “Authoritarian Personality.” A chief contributor to this anthology, Theodor Adorno, abandoned his earlier work as a cultural critic to become a proponent of governmentally imposed social therapy. According to Lasch, Adorno condemns undesirable political attitudes as “prejudice” and “by defining prejudice as a ‘social disease’ substituted a medical for a political idiom. In the end, Adorno and his colleagues “relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to scientific study as opposed to philosophical and political debate."

"What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of “free” individual participants, setting goals under scientific direction and having their material interests monitored by a “conductor state.” The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientific management."

"Today we have techniques of manipulation on a scale that would have done Callicles proud. They are not playful transgressions; we do well to fear the link between such power and what passes for knowledge. If there is only persuasion, Plato warns us, there is no discourse except the confrontation of power and propaganda. If we cannot draw the line, he says, all means of persuasion will be acceptable. Violence may be done to us, in crude or subtle ways and we will not be able to stop it. Even worse, we may not be aware of it."

"The invasion of government and the courts by behavioral scientists has produced what Thomas Szasz calls “the therapeutic state.” Psychiatrists and social psychologists have been given social status, according to Szasz, and their moral and political judgments, though not always founded on hard, empirical science, are taken to the “expert.” These experts today can affect decisions about the responsibility of criminals, the right to control property, and the custody of children. “Psychiatric theologians” have been able to impose their private political opinions as “scientific” truth, and Szasz cites the fact that the American Psychiatric Association now defines the involuntary treatment and incarceration of mental patients as “health rights.” Szasz also observes, “If people think that health values justify coercion, but that moral and political do not, those who wish to coerce others will tend to enlarge the category of health values at the expense of moral values. “Health values” have also become socialized through a global managerial culture. Since 1976 the United Nations, through its International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights, has elevated “the enjoyment of the highest standard of mental health” to a sacred entitlement. Henceforth governments must ensure a sound state of mind as a “human right.""

"The major difference, I would submit, between left and right (in America today)... (is) that the left wishes to extend Jacobin democracy at home, while the right hopes to spread it everywhere else. Thus, the left accelerates the managerial-therapeutic domination of American society through anti-discrimination, victimological, redistributionist programs. The right, by contrast, (merely) considers domestic reform to have been already accomplished..."

"The political class has adopted inclusiveness and diversity as a political instrument, as a means of controlling a society it has set about reshaping. The “diversity machine” is a mechanism of state power that operates without anyone being permitted to notice its coercive nature. Therapeutic regimes are packaged in a way that disguises their resort to force; both the Left and establishment Right in the United States, which misrepresent political life, have helped to make this concealment possible."

"We are horrified by the fantasy of a subtle use of violence that could change us without our knowing it. This would be the ultimate weapon of offense or defense. But whether this pure power appears in its positive role as The Method for finding truth, or in its negative role as the Sophistic power of persuasion, the same mistake occurs."

"We no longer even determine who should be allowed to enter the country and become a citizen since the demand for such control is itself seen as undemocratic; only neo-fascists, as our journalists now tell us, would try to restrict immigration or oppose open borders with third-world countries. A self-restricted political community, as Paul Veyne makes clear, is the mark of ancient and medieval democracies in republics. A government's denial to its citizens of their right to limit citizenship on any grounds they see fit indicates according to Veyne not a democratic but an imperial order, a supernational sovereignty in which the ruler or ruling class allows anyone born or found in that territory to become a subject not a citizen. These remarks (however) are not intended as an endorsement of a return to a racially homogeneous ancient politics I shall leave it to Sam Francis to make that case."

"The question that poses itself is exactly what one means by “democracy.” Is it to be identified with self-conscious peoples ruling themselves, or does it entail the establishment and maintenance of “civic culture” by experts with “progressive” social views? Although these two opposed understandings have coexisted in the same societies, they are fundamentally incompatible."

"Today pluralism operates as a court religion, while having less and less intellectual credibility. Betraying the plastic terminology in which its directives are framed are the additions to the “Human Rights Code” passed in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1994. The Code cites “human dignity” to justify the criminalization of “conduct or communication [that] promotes the superiority or inferiority of a person or class because of race, class, or sexual orientation.” The law has already been applied to prosecute scholars making hereditarian arguments about social behavior, and its proponents defend this muzzling as necessary for “human dignity.” But never are we told whence that dignity is derived. It is certainly not the one to which the Bible, a text that unequivocally condemns certain “sexual orientations,” refers. Nor are we speaking here about the dignity of nonengineered academic discourse, an act that the supporters of the Ontario Human Rights Code consider to be criminal if judged insensitive. Yet the pluralist advocates of human rights codes that now operate in Canada, Australia, England, and on the European continent assume there is a human dignity. Indeed this dignity is so widely and passionately accepted, or so it is asserted, that we must criminalize unkind communication. In the name of that supposedly axiomatic dignity, we are called upon to suppress scholarship and even to imprison its authors."

"A good book with a special interest for English readers... I hope it will have the widest possible circulation."

"I hope that many people will read it and find it stimulating."

"This book will have an appreciable influence on our thinking both now and after the war... Terse, pungent and eloquent, trenchant and persuasive... It will attract wide attention."

"The evidentiary base of the racial theory of Indian civilization was never very firm, and subsequent developments have only served to weaken it further. Its great appeal for Europeans had been that it attributed the civilizing of India to peoples related to themselves. But, by the 1920s, it became plain that mounds of old brick being excavated in the Indus valley were the remains of an urban civilization that was older than the chronological horizon of the Veda. The discovery of the Indus Civilization should have put paid to the racial theory of Indian civilization... That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a miracle of faith."

"Why project an alien [racial] discourse onto the distant Indian past?"

"Our religious heritage, as we have said, requires of us a belief in the dignity and worth of the common man. Our political institutions have been formed to protect this belief and to give it chance for expression. If we neglect those institutions or misunderstand them, if we neglect our religious heritage or forget what it demands of us, we expose ourselves to the danger that there may appear in our midst men willing to seize absolute power and to bring back that ancient curse, the sovereign state. There can be no Christianity in such a state, no honor for the common man. Our fathers knew this in theory, which is why they labored to build a constitutional government and not an irresponsible "state." We have learned the lesson pragmatically, watching with astonished eyes while all the theories of our fathers are proved by the most ruthless of teachers. This is why we must labor not only to destroy the Axis but to remove the sovereign state, the Moloch state, from the face of the earth."

"The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. If a paper consults only the wishes of its readers, it may never print a lie but it may also never print a word that justifies its freedom. The divorce news, the crime news, the sports news, the women’s-page news, the news of great disasters or great battles — this is sure to be popular. But if this were all that a newspaper printed, there would be no need to give it special protection under the Constitution. The protection is needed for the printing of news that someone would prefer not to hear, or that someone else would prefer not to have told."

"It is worth saying again: Indophobia did not spring up naturally from the soil of Britain, it was deliberately built. India was very different from Britain, to be sure, but Britons did not believe they were "every way different" from the Indians until Grant taught them to think so."

"For what profoundly separated Jones and Mill, and the Oriental renaissance from British Indophobia, was the power of the idea of ancient wisdom in the one, and of progress or future wisdom in the other. The Oriental renaissance depended upon the conviction that a numinous truth was captured in the Veda, that this wisdom was mankind's original religion and the source of civilization. As opposed to that, it was the formation of an idea of progress unqualified by the idea of ancient wisdom that sustained Mill and gave him the theoretical grounding for an aggressive policy of modernization. With the idea that the primitive condition of humankind was rude, ignorant, and barbarous, Mill quashed the ancient wisdom idea and forced new, harsh readings of India's past upon the scholarly product of Orientalism."

"The Boden Professorship had been privately endowed for the purpose of promoting the spread of Christianity by the translation of the Bible into Sanskrit. It was awarded to Monier-Williams by vote of convocation following a period of heavy lobbying, in which Max Muller's broad religious views and foreign birth worked against him even though he was much the better Sanskritist. It was a bitter defeat for him..."

"[T]he extraordinary skill and judgement with which Mr. Agar brings back the "feeling" of those years, so near in time, so hard to recapture in spirit, that followed the ending of the Second World War... Mr. Agar is masterly."

"James Mill's highly influential History of British India (1817), most particularly the long essay "Of the Hindus," comprising ten chapters, is the single most important source of British Indophobia and hostility to Orientalism."

"Thus, even though it is only recently that the Aryan debate has become a large, noisy public debate, it has been with us for a long time at a lower level of intensity and public participation, and the issues remain unsettled. But times have changed, and today the civility with which these things used to be debated-the respect participants showed to the view of the opposing side, so noticeable in Majumdar's volume on the Vedic age-has gone out the window, unfortunately."

"The supply of horses . . . has been a preoccupation of the rulers of India, from, nearly, one end of its recorded history to the other. . . . It has yet to be determined why exactly India has never been self-sufficient in horses. Climate? A relative scarcity of pasture?" ... whatever the reason, the stock has always had to be replenished by imports, and the imports came from westward in the ancient period. . . . It is a structure of its history, then, that India has always been dependent upon western and central Asia for horses."

"That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a miracle of faith. Is it not time we did away with it? The first effort to find direct evidence of the physical features of the Indian aborigines in the Sanskrit texts dating from the time of the Big Bang that brought Indian civilization into existence . . . boiled down to a matter of noses."

"British Indomania did not die of natural causes; it was killed off. The Indophobia that became the norm in early-nineteenth-century Britain was constructed by Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism, and its chief architects were Charles Grant and James Mill."

"The Aryan idea stood as a sign of kinship and the political rhetoric of love; those who rejected the rhetoric of love, and they were many, also tended to ignore or attack the Aryan idea, to deny a close kinship of Britons and Indians, and to oppose the Orientalists.-(48)"

"Moreover, what used to be a debate among scholars has boiled up and spilled over into the public arena, and the sober works of academics are now swamped by the often overheated writings and websites of those who are not scholars trained in the history, linguistics, and archaeology of ancient India. Partisan politics have entered into the debate. What used to be a polite disagreement among scholars has become a strident public shouting match in which personal insults are all too freely thrown about. Scholarship, of course, always involves disagreement and debate, and indeed we must have disagreement and debate so that interpretations of history are rigorously tested, for without them there is no hope of progress in historical knowledge. But when the debate becomes too heated and polemical, such that writers attack one another with ferocity, as has been the case of the Aryan debate in recent years, it becomes more difficult to determine the truth of the matter, and easier to be thrown off the track of historical truth in favour of political or religious objectives."

"A serious and searching book... Illuminating interpretations... Often we have been reminded by it of the writings of C. E. Montague after the last war. We cannot give it higher praise."

"This uncompromising judgment falls especially upon those Indians who are under British rule, the Bengalis, and among them especially the Hindus, and the content of their moral depravity (which Grant descants upon at length) is that they are lacking in truth, honesty, and good faith to a degree not found in European society. Grant is blunt in the interest not of condemning the Indians but of determining "their true place in the moral scale," ... What he insists upon is the universality of this great depravity in Hindu society, giving it a general moral hue, "between which and the European moral complexion there is a difference analogous to the difference of the natural colour of the two races" (1796:25). But the purpose is neither condemnation for its own sake nor to assert the permanent inferiority of another race."

"The argument from silence was once regarded as a weak argument, to be used sparingly and with care, but for some time now authors have become responsible for the infinity of what they do not say, and they are liable to be charged with erasures, elisions, suppressions, guilty silences, and significant omissions. The argument from silence is made more easily today, but even by the higher standard of the past, the complete silence of Grant and Mill on the core argument of Jones is surely significant of a tendency to stress the difference "every way" of the Indians and the British."

"As Trautmann notes: "This tree paradigm remains very much the foundation of historical linguistics to this day, although a kind of willful collective amnesia has tended to suppress its biblical origins. . . . In the self-conception of linguistics there came to be a strong tendency to imagine that its central conceptual structure comes from comparative anatomy and to forget that it comes from the Bible" (1997, 57)."

"A book which had a particular influence on me was the American Herbert Agar's A Time for Greatness, which appeared in 1944. This was a strangely powerful analysis of how the West's moral failure allowed the rise of Hitler and the war which had followed. It urged a return to Western liberal democratic values and – though I liked this less – a fair amount of left-wing social engineering. For me the important message of Agar's book was that the fight against Hitler had a significance for civilization and human destiny which exceeded the clash of national interests or spheres of influence or access to resources or any of the other – doubtless important – stuff of power politics."

"Written with great penetration and of special interest to our time."

"The racial theory of Indian civilization was formed in a period after the ending of slavery in Europe and the United States, in the aftermath of which there grew up a racialized division of labour, combined with social segregation on the basis of race. The system of indentured labour, involving large numbers of Indian workers being shipped to distant colonies of the British Empire after the abolition of slavery to work for very low wages, contributed to the racialization and globalization of the division of labour."

"We are not the arsenal of democracy. We are still in the position of regarding the war as a combination of a major charity and a small boom. Another danger story, which Wheeler and Lindbergh are fostering is that this is just another of the old wars, and that it is only necessary to get rid of a few Germans and everything will be all right. That is a story which should be kept out of the public mind because it is a lie, and because it tends to keep America out of the war. We have to realize, and make all the American people understand, that this is a definitive revolution on a world scale against civilization as it exists. It aims to kill everything that stands for freedom; and there is no hope unless we think in terms like these."

"The paradox of these developments is that in spite of the growing distrust between Sanskritists and race science, the two sides of an often noisy dispute nevertheless collaborated, without really meaning to, in the creation of an enduring synthesis, what I call the racial theory of Indian civilization. By this I mean the theory, which by century's end had become a settled fact, that the constitutive event for Indian civilization, the Big Bang through which it came into being, was the clash between invading, fair-skinned, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans and dark-skinned, barbarous aborigines. It was a local application of the double binary that guided all nineteenth-century European ethnologies, the double binary of the fair and the dark, the civilized and the savage."

"The argument I should like to make, then, is not that the racial theory of Indian civilization is a fabrication, a tissue of lies, or that the Veda has nothing useful to say (or nothing that we can reasonably draw from it) about the ethnological situation of its time. What I want to show is that the Vedic evidence that has been brought forward has been subjected to a consistent overreading in favor of a racializing interpretation, and that the image of the "dark-skinned savage" is only imposed on the Vedic evidence with a considerable amount of text-torturing, both "substantive" and "adjectival" in character."

"The [Dasyu/Dasa] image of the 'dark-skinned savage' is only imposed on the Vedic evidence with a considerable amount of text-torturing."

"...Macdonell and Keith wish to impose the "dark-skinned savage" on what the R# Veda says about the Dasyus/Dasas, but that the text does not entirely cooperate with the two parts of this image: First, darkness of skin was not a salient marker of Dasyu/Dasa identity to the hymn writers, for whom the most important attributes of these enemies had rather to do with language and religion; the matter of flat noses is limited to a single disputed passage. Second, the Dasyus/Dasas are depicted as wealthy and powerful opponents, but Macdonell and Keith minimize this evidence and represent them instead as marginal, barbarous hill tribes, consistent with their image of the dark-skinned savage.... What is remarkable about these articles is the way in which they extract the dark-skinned savage from a very recalcitrant Vedic text. The first half of the image is drawn from a grand total of two passages referring to dark skin and a single one interpreted to mean "flat-nosed" against ancient authorities. But, as the articles themselves make abundantly clear, the significant social markers separating Aryas from Dasas or Dasyus for the writers of the texts are religion, above all, and language, while complexion is barely mentioned. The second half of the image, savagery, is completely contrary to the evidence of wealth and many forts possessed by these enemies, which the authors dismiss without evidence."

"In this fantastic back-projection of systems of racial segregation in the American South and in South Africa onto early Indian history, the relations of the British "new invader from Europe" with the peoples of India is prefigured thousands of years before by the invading Aryans."

"Israeli military operations have created an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time. But are Israel’s actions — as the nation’s opponents argue — verging on ethnic cleansing or, most explosively, genocide? As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time."

"Some of the most inclusive and visionary ideas of human liberation have historically been formulated by those on the margins, those excluded from formal political power, the stigmatized, semiliterate, “backward,” and “illegal.”"

"...If there is, to my mind, blame, the blame is in the 1930s and the blame is when millions of people were trying to escape regimes that were saying that they would like to be rid of them. And countries like the Unites States said, well, we have no room, but the United States then had half the population that it has today, so obviously it did have some room. And Hitler at the time was saying, well, nobody wants them so we’ll take care of it. That, I think, is the point. And if you want to learn anything, any sort of lesson from all that, to me there is one important lesson, that when you can identify people who are in need, who are in danger and you just shut your eyes, close your ears and say I don’t want to know about them, then you are signing a death warrant."

"When women took to their piazzas and fields in Sicily in 1892–94, they focused their anger on those who directly challenged their ability to subsist. Many considered the nation-state, large landholders, and those priests who were allied with such interests to be the most egregious off enders. After the Italian nation was formed in 1861, many members of the urban bourgeoisie and middle classes supported the national project, but most of the poor actively revolted against it. For the vast majority of Italy’s residents—the peasantry—the new state meant excessive taxation, forced conscription, dispossession from land, widespread poverty, police brutality, and government repression."

"Local economies gave shape to women’s protests, whether they were based in subsistence agriculture, market cultivation, or large wheat estates. The tactics of striking and land occupation, for example, were more common in towns dominated by large- scale agriculture and industry. Tax protests typically occurred in places that were market- oriented. Because of this, the movement differed depending on the locale, leading the fasci to function in multiple ways—as mutual aid societies, trade unions, agricultural cooperatives, and political parties. In each of these towns, however, the fasci included the majority of residents. They might have developed in a single neighborhood but very quickly branched outward."

"If we truly believe that the Holocaust taught us a lesson about the need — or really, the duty — to preserve our own humanity and dignity by protecting those of others, this is the time to stand up and raise our voices, before Israel’s leadership plunges it and its neighbors into the abyss. There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide. We cannot wait a moment longer."

"It is clear that the daily violence being unleashed on Gaza is both unbearable and untenable. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas — itself a war crime and a crime against humanity — Israel’s military air and ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 10,500 Palestinians, according to the , a number that includes thousands of children. That’s well over five times as many people as the more than 1,400 people in Israel murdered by Hamas. In justifying the assault, Israeli leaders and generals have made terrifying pronouncements that indicate a genocidal intent. Still, the collective horror of what we are watching does not mean that a genocide, according to the international legal definition of the term, is already underway. Because genocide, sometimes called “the crime of all crimes,” is perceived by many to be the most extreme of all crimes, there is often an impulse to describe any instance of mass murder and massacre as genocide. But this urge to label all atrocious events as genocide tends to obfuscate reality rather than explain it."

"My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action."