Author: Sumantra Maitra

Review—Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

Published by Sumantra Maitra

A review of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor.  Hurst (March 2, 2017). In November 2011, Pankaj Mishra, an Indian author, literary critic, and essayist for the Guardian and the New York Times, wrote a scathing review of Niall Ferguson’s Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the prestigious London Review of Books. Ferguson is a pop historian, and his recent polemic depicting Henry Kissinger as an idealist is a corny and ahistorical piece of work for any serious scholar of International Relations. But on one point, Ferguson has been remarkably consistent and fair—that there needs to be a more nuanced assessment of Britain’s Imperial legacy. Since the Second World War, the prevailing view in academia has been that colonialism was an unpardonable and incomparable sin that plagued the globe for over two hundred years. Any counterpoint to this view is routinely dismissed as pro-colonial and therefore, by definition, racist. Ferguson has argued in several books that colonialism is a much more complicated subject than such black-and-white rhetoric allows. For this, he has been skewered from all sides, most savagely by Mishra in the LRB, who was subsequently threatened …

Methods Behind the Campus Madness

Published by Sumantra Maitra

Unless you are living under a rock, you should know that a recent talk by Charles Murray was shouted down by a group of Middlebury College Maoists and was followed by random acts of violence and assault in a carpark. As Murray was escorted out, by Professor Allison Stanger, a renowned scholar of International Relations, a lady more courageous than any of the wannabe Red Guards acting like brutes in a pack, she was pulled by her hair, which affected her neck, and she was forced to go to the hospital and wear a neck brace. Murray, a scholar known for his provocative, and hitherto unreplicated 1994 opus, The Bell Curve, was invited to the college to give a talk about his more recent book, Coming Apart. The rest, is well archived and painful. I wrote recently that the campus violence won’t stop with the violence in Berkeley against Milo. I wasn’t wrong. One look at the protesters would be enough to fathom that none of them even bothered to read Murray’s scholarship; that would …

The Hypocrisy of Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy

Published by Sumantra Maitra

Sweden is apparently world’s first officially self declared “Feminist” government. The brave sisters, of the foreign affairs department, recently obliterated the patriarchy in the United States, with a staged photo onslaught. But that was before they surrendered to the dictates of an Islamist theocracy, just like all good Western feminists should. In a scenario all too painfully familiar in recent days, a bunch of privileged Western women found liberation in keeping their head down and knowing their place. Look, I have nothing against Iran, in fact, I respect them, that they are iron-spined and strong enough to make Western governments bow down in front of them and their rules, regardless of which continent they are in. I find the weakness and hypocrisy of the other side more abhorrent. In what can be termed as the most abjectly hypocritical turnaround in recent history, Sweden’s annoyingly grandstanding government, paraded (or should I say, reverse-slutwalked) with their heads covered in a visiting delegation to Iran. Why such a fuss with Sweden, you might wonder? After all, from Federica …

Artificially Inflating the Threat From Russia Does Nobody Any Good

Published by Sumantra Maitra

Much has been written lately about Russia “hacking” the US presidential elections, and how Vladimir Putin’s government is in a new Cold War with the West. Molly Mckew, who advised Mikhail Saakashvili when he was president of Georgia, writes that the West is already fighting a war in defence of the values on which its liberal order is based. Like many others, she never attempts to define what exactly “The West” is, or what its contradictory state interests add up to. In the Financial Times, meanwhile, Lilia Shevtsova is even more pessimistic. She claims the current situation is without historical precedent, and that current Western strategy “requires ideological clarity, but the ambiguity of the post-Cold War world made the strategy irrelevant”. Countless pieces like these are churned out in the Anglophone media every day. They share a remarkable deficit of proportion and objectivity; they present what’s happening today as historically unprecedented, an incorrect diagnosis that simply stirs up hysteria and panic. They also overlook the pattern that Russian foreign policy has followed since the collapse …

Make Expertise Great Again

Published by Sumantra Maitra

A review of  by The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, by Tom Nichols. Oxford University Press, (1 April, 2017) 272 pages.   The long-awaited book by Professor Tom Nichols, (AKA @RadioFreeTom) The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters is finally out this year. And perhaps no other topic can be as important, given the tectonic shifting year in global politics we just had. Political Scientists don’t often get credit for genuine predictions or trend recognition, although the majority of them invite flak for failed ones. Credit, therefore goes to Nichols. He identified, what is currently one of the most destructive trends in this post-truth world, a disdain towards any sort of acquired knowledge and expertise, and he identified that trend in 2013 in this famous blog post. That blog post was expanded to a full length Op-Ed for The Federalist in 2014, which came out as a complete thesis in the first month of 2017. The book, which  is soon to be …

The Berkeley Riots and the Tyranny of the Righteous Minority

Published by Sumantra Maitra

This is what happened, for the uninitiated. Donald Trump’s Brit cheerleader, self proclaimed supervillain and “dangerous faggot,” agent provocateur Milo had a talk scheduled in Berkeley, the once proud bastion of liberal thought and free speech, the place where the free speech movement and the Anti-Vietnam movement started in 1968. His speech was cancelled after volatile rioting broke out. Arguably, the last eight years under Obama, as I mentioned in an earlier column, have been the most divisive since late Nixon’s Presidency. The President’s office has not been neutral, they have actively put fuel on the fire, with absurd demands of universities to uphold Title IX over and above other considerations, such the First Amendment. What has been unfolding on U.S. campuses — no platforming, race baiting, and outright censorship — has been left to spiral out of control while all the adults in these situations seem to have completely abdicated all responsibility. Unfortunately for these radicals, however, Trump has come along and shattered their sense of power. And he has support in actual working-class America. What …

The New Trump-ian Order

Published by Sumantra Maitra

It is exhausting to write similar ledes but the subject demands special attention. The world has entered a new era, a pole was switched almost overnight, and a completely different order than the one that was followed since 1945, is upon us. The best way to know what’s coming in front of us, is by having an open and skeptical mind, particularly towards the conventional wisdom which is now emanating from the mainstream commerical media. Unfortunately, the reactions in the last couple of days, and the hysteria which seems to be the natural state of Western politics is evidence enough that the “anti-Trump/anti-Brexit” liberals are now determined to take the completely wrong and ahistorical lessons from 2016. The liberal reaction of Trump’s win is one of brokenness and despair, but worse than that, it is an open season of fake expertise and fairly straightforward misrepresentation. David Frum, editor of Atlantic, tweeted that Trump is the worst President in the history of US, including those who owned slaves. Susan Hennessey, editor of Lawfare and former NSA …

Trump, NATO and the Persistent Myths of International Relations

Published by Sumantra Maitra

There’s a German word, which is useful to explain what I, and other political realists felt, after Donald Trump gave his first ever interview as PEOTUS to a British newspaper. Of course, the liberal Twitterati exploded. And yes the word is, as some of you might have guessed, schadenfreude. Most of us are not Trump supporters or fans, nor do we consider Trump to be an elegant statesman or practitioner of realpolitik. But his statements were inevitable and predicatable for anyone — barring the diehard liberal ideologues. The apparent breaking point for the Twitterati was reached when Trump called Merkel’s open gate foreign policy a catastrophe, openly siding with UK against EU with regards to Brexit, and trashing NATO as a Byzantine bureaucracy, calling it “obsolete”. How dare Trump criticise the quite obviously flawed and stagnating liberal global order? The global order paid for and secured by American taxpayers, mind you, and managed by terminally incompetent technocrats, adhering to a radical universalist ideology. How dare he invite the rage of the Davos men (as Samuel …

The BuzzFeed Fiasco Shows Us Why Trust in Institutions Is Dying

Published by Sumantra Maitra

Editor’s note: this is an unfolding story based on information that the author and editor are not privy to. As such, this essay is not an analysis of the alleged incidents reported in the dossier released by Buzzfeed, but a comment on the prudence of releasing such unverified information to the public, which is not heretofore a standard media practice.    I was almost planning to turn my laptop off on a freezing English winter night, when the C4 hit my phone. A colleague texted me asking if I was checking Twitter at that moment. BuzzFeed apparently did some clickbait, and dumped raw, uncorroborated, third hand HUMINT (human intelligence) data with a nudge nudge wink wink “see what you make of it” type caveat, about Donald Trump. This material included a lurid tryst with a bevy of Moscow maidens apparently recorded by secret devices. BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith spouted some neuron altering, circuit frying justification on why he chose to go ahead in publishing this “dossier”, because apparently Americans “should decide for themselves.” (Although, the …

How Will History Remember Obama?

Published by Sumantra Maitra

Ta-Nehisi Coates started the revisionism over the most divisive and controversial President in post Cold war history, as Ta-Nehisi Coates is wont to do. Which is unfortunate, because Obama, for good or for bad, deserves a fair, objective, non-linear analysis of his record, and a certainly more nuanced look than the partisan hagiographies that are currently emerging. President Obama, the first biracial leader of the free world, and one of the most gifted extemporaneous speakers of our time, is a textbook example of a young, professorially cynical, cautious, but overall idealistic young leader who was eventually chastened by time. Coates’ essay is a start in what will be the repeated partisan glossing of the legacy of an interesting character, but one who was eventually defeated by personal naiveté and the structural forces that resided outside of his control. He deserves a more thorough scrutiny than terribly worded think pieces focusing on nothing other than one single defining factor, his race. I remember when Obama stood as a smooth-talking Senator against Hillary Clinton in 2008. My rookie journalism …