POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

The Whitewashing of Antisemitism, a Hatred of Many Colors

Often black. It's an old truth that members of groups that are victimized by hate crimes are no less capable of committing hate crimes, sometimes more so

It was a common occurrence on the streets of one of New York City's Jewish neighborhoods: A man dressed in the long black coat and broad hat worn by Hasidic Jews was walking in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his two young children in hand, when suddenly a black man ran up behind him and hit him hard on the back of the head.

Incidents like that one last May unfold repeatedly in New York, several of them in December alone – an outdoor menorah in Coney Island vandalized; a father and son wearing yarmulkas shot with a BB gun on Staten Island; a group of visibly Jewish boys chased by a gang firing a taser and shouting “Jews run! Get out of here”; a Hasidic man beaten outside a bus stop in Crown Heights.

Such attacks are part of a larger groundswell of antisemitism that has received wide notice across the country in recent years. But what has not gotten much attention is the reticence to even mention the ethnicity of antisemitic perpetrators unless they are white. It appears that discussion of this ancient hatred is being constrained by contemporary politics.

In covering and condemning these acts, most major news outlets and politicians from President Biden on down have described antisemitism as almost entirely a sub-species of white supremacy or white nationalism, invoking the mob in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 shouting “Jews will not replace us,” or the murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 by a white nationalist fanatic.

This narrative obscures the complexity and diversity of the sources fueling the spike in antisemitism, some experts say. Right-wing hate groups are playing their usual part, but so too are blacks and members of other minority groups. The non-white antagonists are erased from the public discourse even though it’s generally understood that it's hard to address a societal problem when society is unwilling to discuss it openly and honestly.

Rationalizations for this reluctance can be strained: When the billionaire black rap entrepreneur Ye, formerly Kanye West, started making a series of antisemitic statements last year, black activist Shaun King wrote in Newsweek, “you don’t have to be white to be a white supremacist,” adding, “Kanye West is now a full-blown white supremacist.”

The antisemitism monitor Israel Bitton uses a new term to frame what is happening. “When anti-Jewish attacks are due to white supremacy, you get a clear condemnation,” said Bitton, executive director of Americans Against Antisemitism, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “When it's committed by others, it's 'inconvenient antisemitism,' because it becomes difficult for some to understand that members of groups that are also victimized by hate crimes are no less capable of committing hate crimes.”

Put another way, attention to hate crimes committed by minorities doesn’t conform to a simpler narrative that “systemic racism” is the dominant and overwhelming fact of American life – and certain, approved, minorities its victims.

And so Jew-hatred bubbles ever more loudly as background noise. Verbal and physical assaults against Jews increased by 34% between 2021 and 2022, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the civil rights organization that keeps track of such things. In a new study just released, the ADL reports that the number of Americans “harboring extensive antisemitic prejudice” has reached “the highest level in decades.”

This spike comes on top of the historical pattern documented by FBI statistics. While notably incomplete in cataloging perpetrators, they show that Jews, who make up 2.5% of the total U.S. population, are more often the targets of hate crimes than all other religious groups – Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, and others – combined.

Data collected about antisemitic violence in New York, home to America’s largest Jewish population, shows clearly that when it comes to antisemitism, minorities are often, even disproportionately, perpetrators, not victims. Since 2018, according to New York Police Department crime reports, there have been 129 arrests of suspects in violent hate crimes against Jews; 92 of the suspects, or 72%, were members of minority groups. The crime reports don't do a further breakdown – what proportion of the minority perpetrators may be black, Hispanic, Muslim or something else – but the available evidence indicates that a substantial number of the attacks are being perpetrated by young black men.

When perpetrators are white supremacists, the outrage is louder than when they are “inconvenient antisemites.” When former President Trump hosted a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in November with West and Nick Fuentes, a well-known white supremacist who attended the 2017 demonstration in Charlottesville, the expressions of shock and condemnation, including by Jewish Republicans, were loud and clear.

But as Americans Against Antisemitism found in a recent study, not only are attacks against Hasidic Jews largely ignored or downplayed, only a very small number of the perpetrators end up being prosecuted in court.

Even horrific crimes committed by minority group members that are prosecuted tend to receive muted attention, at least compared with crimes committed by whites. Bitton cites two examples: One was the shooting deaths of five people, including the two assailants, at a kosher grocery in Jersey City at the end of 2019. One of the gunmen, David Anderson, had posted hundreds of anti-Jewish and anti-police hate messages on social media. He was an adherent of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a cult that believes African Americans are the true Jews and that the white people claiming to be Jews are, as one of Anderson's posts put it, “imposters who inhabited synagogues of Satan.”

Another incident cited by Bitton took place during Hanukkah in December 2019, when a machete-wielding man broke into the home of a Hasidic rabbi in Monsey, N.Y., and wounded five men, one of whom later died. The perpetrator, Grafton E. Thomas, also an adherent of the Black Israelite philosophy, was found in possession of journals full of antisemitic statements, including pictures of swastikas and Jewish stars – prefiguring a Twitter post by Kanye West showing a swastika superimposed on a Star of David.

“These stories, where the victims were Hasidic and the perpetrators black, didn't get the same national attention as the Tree of Life synagogue attack,” Bitton said. “There was no major press coverage, no White House consolation calls.”

Today's antisemites are a mixed group of strange bedfellows. Among them are the traditional white nationalist haters of Jews, like those who rioted in Charlottesville or other groups – for example, the one that, somewhat sarcastically, calls itself the Goyim Defense League (goyim being a Yiddish word for non-Jew), which distributed fliers in Beverly Hills last November saying, “Every single aspect of the Covid agenda is Jewish.” The flier then listed the names of some prominent figures in the medical field who are Jewish, such as the chief scientist at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, as if that proved the existence of some dark conspiracy to inflict the world with a deadly virus.

Among the strange bedfellows are elements of the leftist “woke” culture, though this is a complicated phenomenon, with sharp disagreement about whether some beliefs or statements – most notably condemnations of Israel and the movement to boycott it – are indeed antisemitic or merely expressions of opposition to Israeli policies.

What is not in doubt is that the movement to declare Israel a pariah state has become the movement du jour on college campuses, which has made some Jewish students and faculty feel targeted.

Last year, for example, nine student organizations at the University of California Law School adopted a bylaw, initially adopted by the group Students for Justice in Palestine, that banned supporters of Zionism from speaking at their events. That incident attracted widespread attention, but there have been dozens of similar incidents on campuses across the country that have drawn much less notice.

According to an ADL report published in May last year, these anti-Israel gestures have included graffiti saying, “Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea,” or, more crudely, “Fuck Israel, Fuck Zionists.” Israeli flags have been burned during anti-Israel demonstrations. On several campuses there have been calls to boycott classes on Israel or classes taught by Israelis. Jewish students holding positions in student government have been pressured to resign. “I have been told that my support for Israel has made me complicit in racism and that, by association, I am a racist,” a student at the University of Southern California said after resigning her post in response to such a petition.

At the University of Chicago last January, Students for Justice in Palestine called for a boycott of “classes on Israel or those taught by Israeli fellows,” because, as one supporter of the boycott put it in the Maroon, the campus newspaper, “certain classes promote colonial narratives and Zionist propaganda.”

When the Maroon published an op-ed charging that the boycott was in effect a call to discriminate against individuals because of their national origin, the pro-Palestinian group demanded that the paper withdraw the column, citing some minor factual errors. Instead of correcting the presumed errors, the editors quickly caved in to the pro-Palestinian students' demand.

It's in this environment, ADL data shows, that between 2022 and 2021 there was a 31% increase in instances of vandalism, threats, and slurs against Jews on campuses across the country. “The narrative on campus is that if you are a Zionist, if you in any way shape or form think that Israel has the right to exist, you are the same as those who support ethnic cleansing and genocide and you are so morally compromised that people shouldn't even engage with you,” a student at Berkeley Law, Charlotte Aaron, told the Wall Street Journal.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/01/19/the_whitewashing_of_antisemitism_a_hatred_of_many_colors_876229.html

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Letting Children Play Outside Is Not Neglect

Cripes! When I was a kid on many weekends my parents would have had no idea where I was. And as long as I was home in time for dinner they were OK about it

America can’t be the land of the free if its kids are cooped up inside. It can’t be the home of the brave if kids aren't allowed to have a few adventures.

Each year, the nonprofit I helm, Let Grow, works with local advocacy groups, parents and sometimes even children to get states to pass the “Reasonable Childhood Independence” law.

This law says that “child neglect” is when you put your tot in serious, obvious and likely danger — not anytime you take your eyes off them.

Want your children to play outside, walk to the store, come home with a latchkey? Parents don’t have to second-guess themselves in the four states where this bill has passed, always with bipartisan sponsorship. In fact, it sailed through red state Utah and blue state Colorado unanimously.

This is the testimony I always submit. Wish us luck.

“To the State Legislators:

This is regarding the so-called ‘Reasonable Childhood Independence Bill,’ which I am in favor of.

My name is Lenore Skenazy. After my column “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone” landed me on every talk show from ‘The Today Show’ to ‘Dr. Phil’ I founded the book, blog and movement ‘Free-Range Kids,’ which has grown into the nonprofit Let Grow.

At Let Grow, we believe in safety: Helmets, seatbelts, car seats… We just don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave the house.

And yet, despite crime plummeting about 50 percent since its peak in the 1990s — and remaining far below those tough years even now — just 11 percent of kids walk to school these days.

One study found that only 6 percent of kids ages 9-13 play outside on their own for an hour or more a week.

Instead, many kids are driven from activity to activity, and plenty more spend hours on the couch, staring at a screen. There are many reasons for this, but one is that some parents worry that even if they know their kids are capable of walking to the store, or grandma’s, someone else might consider them ‘neglected’ and call 911.

They are scared by stories of parents whose confidence in their kids was mistaken for neglect. Parents like Kari Anne Roy, who let her 6-year-old play outside within view of the house, but was investigated for neglect when a passerby called the cops.

A caseworker interviewed all three of Kari’s kids, asking her daughter, age 8, ‘Do your parents ever show you movies with naked people in them?’ What?? Kari was so upset. But the caseworker had to check off the boxes.

Natasha Felix let her kids, 11, 9, and 5, play at the park across from her apartment and she, too, was investigated for neglect. And there’s the famous case of Danielle and Alex Meitiv who let their kids, 10 and 6, walk home from the park together and were investigated not once but twice.

That’s not to mention the parents whose strained finances leave them no choice but to trust their kids with independence as soon as they believe they’re ready for it. This makes overly broad neglect laws a social justice issue: If helicopter parenting is the law of the land, what about those who literally cannot afford to do it?

But childhood freedom is not just a parenting issue. It’s a health issue. As children’s independence has been going down, childhood depression, anxiety and even suicide have been going up.

A Reasonable Childhood Independence Bill would reassure parents that giving their kids some old-fashioned freedom — by choice OR economic necessity — will not be mistaken for neglect. Neglect is when you blatantly disregard your child’s safety. Not when you trust them to start becoming part of the world.

Let the authorities investigate true cases of neglect, not parents who give their kids the kind of childhood we grew up with — and are grateful for.

https://www.nysun.com/article/letting-kids-play-outside-is-not-neglect

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If Leftist Keir Starmer gets to be British Prime Minister, the rights of women in Britain could be set back decades

By SARAH VINE

To say the Labour Party has a problem with women, as its MP for Canterbury Rosie Duffield claimed last week, is not strictly true.

It would be fairer to say that it has a problem with biological women or, to use the rather unpleasant and derogatory-sounding term imposed upon us by the trans lobby and its various supporters, a ‘cis’ women problem. (Cis – or cisgender – is a term used to describe a person whose gender identity corresponds with their biological sex.)

By contrast, if you are a trans woman – that is to say, a person born with the biological characteristics of a male who has chosen to live, either full-time or part time, either superficially (by adopting the appearance of a woman) or irreversibly (by undergoing hormone therapy or gender reassignment surgery) as a female – then the Labour Party loves you.

Adores you, worships you, in fact; dances on eggshells around you, bows and scrapes, fawns, respects your every wish – regardless of what that means for other women. If you are a trans woman (or girl), the Labour Party will prioritise your needs and wants, your worries and concerns, over boring old biological women (or girls) at every turn.

It will even try to gaslight biological women into believing that our rights are inferior to those of trans women, that we are somehow second class to our trans sisters –and that anyone who dares challenge that narrative only has themselves to blame when, like Ms Duffield, they end up being roundly abused.

That’s the sexism at the heart of this. The Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer fundamentally believes that a biological male living as a female is worth more than a biological female just minding her own business.

It would prefer to give in to the demands of a small minority than safeguard the welfare of thousands of women and girls who, on account of generally being physically smaller and weaker than biological males, face all sorts of threats in daily life – from perverted policemen to violent partners – that mean safe, female-only spaces are very important to them. But, because Sir Keir can’t even define what it means to be a woman and do us the basic courtesy of acknowledging our identity, those concerns don’t matter. That is what we learned this week during the debate in Parliament on the Government’s decision to block Nicola Sturgeon’s gender identification legislation, opposition to which is centred on the erosion of safe spaces for women and girls.

As Ms Duffield tried to outline, calmly but with passion, her concerns about what impact this legislation – which would allow ‘anyone at all to legally self-identify as either sex and therefore enter all spaces, including those necessarily segregated by sex, such as domestic violence settings, changing rooms and prisons’ – might have on vulnerable women, she was subjected to horrible abuse from her own side. Former Labour Minister Ben Bradshaw yelled ‘absolute rubbish’ at her, while fellow Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle also tried to shut her down. Ms Duffield later said that Mr Russell-Moyle then sat near another female MP and stared at her ‘in an intimidating way’.

So much of the response to women who dare question the ideology of self-identification is, I’m afraid, highly abusive. It also smacks of a ‘woman, know your place’ type of misogyny that stems from an inalienable sense of superiority in the minds of certain types of men who think they understand the female experience better than we do. But the real elephant in the room, the thing that no one is allowed or has the courage to say, is this: trans women remain – whichever way you cut it – biological males.

Just as trans men remain, biologically, female. Of course, many trans activists don’t accept that notion: they believe that biological sex does not exist, and that self-determined gender cannot be questioned. Which is fine: believe whatever you like; but respect the rights of others to disagree and speak out if they believe an ideology to be harmful.

On the basis that biological sex does exist – which is my assertion – the issue then is that if a trans man enters an all-male space, he does not generally represent a physical threat to other males. Whereas when a trans woman enters an all-female space, there would be much more potential for abuse. Not just because trans women tend to be bigger and stronger than biological women; but also because individuals with a male biology are responsible for 98 per cent of sex crimes and 90 per cent of all other violence.

Individuals, for example, such as Karen White, a convicted paedophile with a history of violent behaviour who was sent to an women’s prison (despite having undergone neither surgery nor hormone treatment) where she proceeded to sexually assault two women.

Fact: men hurt women, and they do it a lot. And if men posing as women (or boys posing as girls) are allowed to enter female spaces without any form of scrutiny – ie via self-identification – the potential for abuse is huge. That’s really all women like Ms Duffield (and J.K. Rowling, who herself also suffered domestic violence at the hands of her ex) are asking: don’t let’s create a situation when ill-intentioned men can game the system to prey on vulnerable women.

And by ‘vulnerable’ I also mean, of course, the vast majority of trans women who, as well as deserving the right to live full lives, free from harassment and prejudice, also deserve protection from predatory males posing as trans.

That’s why it makes sense to keep the current legislation. The law as it stands safeguards trans women as much as anyone else from opportunistic, unscrupulous, and potentially very dangerous individuals.

That the Labour Party cannot even begin to engage with this, or debate it in a civilised manner, does not surprise me.

This is not the first time it has been accused of sexism. It’s not just the experience of women such as Duffield and former Labour MP Luciana Berger (who quit in part over misogyny in the party) – last year the independent Forde Report concluded that there was ‘overt and underlying sexism’ in messages between the party’s senior members of staff.

Labour has never had a woman leader, and now we see why. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have had three. The Tory Party appreciates and understands women, not just within its own ranks but everywhere. That’s why the Prime Minister is right to block this Bill.

It is not the easy, fashionable thing to do – but it is the right thing to do, for the sake of all women, trans or otherwise. And why, if Starmer ever gets to No 10, the rights of women in this country could be set back decades

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11662063/SARAH-VINE-Starmer-gets-No10-rights-women-Britain-set-decades.html

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The Problem With “Historic”

You hear it all the time – so and so is “historic” because of their skin color, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or some other meaningless characteristic. Democrats seem to celebrate those “accomplishments” almost exclusively. This person is “historic” because they’re the first non-binary weirdo to hold whatever job they’ve just been hired for. Honestly, who cares? If who you sleep with defines who you are, you aren’t worth knowing. Yet, these irrelevant characteristics are what the left celebrates, and in many cases, all they see. It’s dehumanizing to the people being “celebrated” and an attempt to control everyone else.

First off, let us start with the new phenomenon of “pronouns.” If anyone has their pronouns listed on social media avoid them at all costs. Don’t befriend them, and do not hire them. They are a victim in search of something to blame for their failure, likely with a lawyer on speed dial, if not a retainer. Victimhood is their true profession.

The thing about pronoun insistence is it’s the ultimate in control. When you speak with a person you don’t refer to them with third-person pronouns, or even their name, you just talk to them like a normal person. So the pronoun use only comes into play when you’re talking about them with others. These piles of garbage want to control how you refer to them when they’re not around, ultimately controlling you. Never, ever comply. It’s the gateway drug for submission.

You saw this on display in stories about allegedly serial luggage thief Sam Brinton. Touted as the “first non-binary” person appointed to a political position in government, this mutant was billed as “historic!” for that very reason. His firing was just as historic, being the first weirdo fired for stealing people’s suitcases, but it didn’t get the same amount of coverage as his appointment.

The same goes for Rachel Levine. The mentally confused man was known for ordering nursing homes in Pennsylvania to accept COVID positive patients at the start of the pandemic, causing thousands of deaths, while moving his mother out of one without telling the public. But because he thinks he’s she he is billed as “historic” and was promoted to Assistant Secretary for Health in the Biden administration.

If you’re some kind of mentally confused gender dysphoria-suffering Democrat you are “historic” and literally cannot fail, even while advocating for the butchering of the bodies of children to suit your delusions.

If you are gay, same thing. If you are not white, same thing. It’s funny how the whitest man to ever hold the presidency, with a long and storied history of racism, is milking having the first gay, black press secretary in history as if it’s one of his (limited) accomplishments.

If you play the left’s game, Karine Jean-Pierre is “historic” for those reasons. If you live in reality, Karine Jean-Pierre is “historic-ally” bad at her job, quite probably the worst. She can’t answer basic questions without reading them from a script provided to her, likely by White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain. Any self-respecting person who’s quit over being forced to serve as a puppet to a senile clown, but KJP is historic!

The term “historic” is tossed around like it’s an accomplishment in and of itself. It is not. Elizabeth Holmes, for disgraced former CEO of Theranos, was declared “historic” because she was the first female Silicon Valley billionaire and was immediately put on magazine covers and every “people to watch under 30” list the left-wing media had to offer. The only problem is no one was watching her. She was a con artist who ripped off investors of billions. They were too busy celebrating her gender to bother to look at whether or not she was a fraud. It wouldn’t have taken much to see it, but it’s amazing what people can miss when they deliberately do not look for it.

Attaching the label “historic” to everything they love, Democrats have stripped it of its meaning related to actual accomplishments. They do not celebrate accomplishments – Elon Musk is a prime example of someone who has made truly historic developments in his fields of business and who is demonized because of his skin color, gender, and, most importantly because he’s exposing the power-plays of the left through Twitter. Musk is more accomplished than anyone Democrats celebrate, and in fields, they insist are wildly important to their agenda (electric vehicles and space travel), but he’s the wrong configuration of human. If he weren’t white or were gay… lookout. (Not now, of course, he’s on the enemies list for wrong-think, but before.)

Simply declaring someone to be “historic” ignores whether or not they’re qualified; whether or not they are capable of doing a job and, more importantly, whether or not they’re any good. The moon landing was “historic” and so were the Hindenburg and Titanic, just for very different reasons. Individuals are no different.

Individuals are only to be elevated if they are configured in certain ways, ways useful to Democrats. That’s slightly better than the Soviet Union, but only slightly. To a normal person, that seems like the opposite of the reason for existence or at least any way to get joy from it – your only value is found in immutable characteristics. The real reason to celebrate anyone is their actual, verifiable accomplishments. That is exactly what the left is trying to prevent, quite possibly because they have none. It would explain why they’re such miserable people.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2023/01/22/the-problem-with-historic-n2618585 ?

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Colonialism did not cause the Indian famines

By Tirthankar Roy (Tirthankar Roy is an Indian economic historian and Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. He is one of the most influential researchers of the Economic History of South Asia and India

Accusations that Britain drained India of resources and starved Indians to death are nothing new in some circles, but at the moment they are being spread with religious zeal. Al Jazeera, the media conglomerate funded by the Qatari government, has recently joined in. But this accusation has long been disproved, and the truth is that British rule in India mitigated famine.

In an Al-Jazeera piece, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel[1] claim that British rule inflicted ‘tremendous loss of life’ in nineteenth-century India by causing the devastating Deccan famines. Imperial policies, they say, made famines ‘more frequent and more deadly.’[2] They cite the economic historian Robert Allen to suggest that Indian living standards declined in the nineteenth century, because the British rule ‘drained’ India of money and food. Indians were starving when the famines hit them. Colonialism triggered the genocide. Social media posts spread similar messages with religious zeal. Many blogs and sites sharing such sentiments have reprinted Sullivan and Hickel’s piece.

Sullivan and Hickel are not doing anything new. In a 2001 book, Mike Davis said Britain’s apathy towards her Indian subjects caused mass deaths in late nineteenth-century Deccan.[3] Indian nationalists argued a hundred years ago that food export supported by a free trade policy and the British-built railways left the Indian countryside with too little food. B.M. Bhatia said that ‘in the earlier times a major famine occurred once every 50 years,’ whereas ‘between 1860 and 1908, famine or scarcity prevailed in … twenty out of the total of forty-nine years,’ implying that colonialism made famines ‘more deadly’.[4]

Economic historians have examined and discarded every one of these assertions. Sullivan and Hickel are salvaging an outdated idea by ignoring the most important research done on the subject. I will offer five grounds to show why their version of history is incorrect and biased.

Five errors of a biased argument

First, the claim that colonialism caused famines cannot be verified against previous experience because there is no evidence that famines were less frequent or less deadly before. Whereas the government statistical system recorded the colonial-era famines, the precolonial data came from hagiographies and travelogues. These dissimilar datasets cannot be compared. The frequency with which famines occurred in earlier times depended on the frequency with which hagiographies were written. If this was once in fifty years, we would conclude that famines happened once in fifty years, as Bhatia did. The authors of these hagiographies praised the relief work because the kings paid them to do that. We might conclude that precolonial kings were more caring than the British. None of this makes any sense.

Second, colonialism cannot be accused of causing famines everywhere. The famines that Davis called late-Victorian holocausts happened in the Deccan, 1876-77 in the Rayalaseema region west of Chennai (Madras), and 1896 and 1898 in the Deccan Traps closer to Mumbai (Bombay). All along, in the Indo-Gangetic Basin, the population rose. The Raj ruled over the north and south. Why did it spare the north?

Here is the answer. The British Raj did not start the famines. Geography did. 1877 was the driest year in over a century (1871-1978) for which rainfall data exists. The average rainfall that year was 30 percent short of the long-term level, and a 25 percent shortfall developed again in 1896 and 1899. Monsoon failure of such an order can cause distress by drying up all accessible water sources. The effect was disastrous in the Deccan Plateau because it was normally much drier than the north and did not have rivers fed by the Himalayan snow, unlike the north. Monsoon rain was the primary source, and when that failed, cultivation stopped, and distressed people lived on infected water to die of cholera. Colonialism had nothing to do with the reason they died.

Third, the living standard research that Sullivan and Hickel cite has a problem. Allen’s work on living standards is pathbreaking, but the India dataset on wages in northern India compiled by early-twentieth-century historians is of doubtful value. These historians left too few details on who earned these wages for what works, or on the labour market, or whether they were men or women, or the contracts involved. These are just numbers without context. A trend drawn by comparing such numbers over the long run may mean that the context of work changed, not the living standard. For example, there was an enormous expansion of casual-wage-based hiring of individual workers in the nineteenth century, whereas earlier employers often hired families or groups and paid them customary fees. The kind of work for which the Mughal household or urban silk factories or the East India Companies hired people did not exist anymore in 1900. Earlier wages were often job-based, later wages were daily or hourly. For all these reasons, later wages could look smaller, but that would not mean that the living standard had fallen.

That Sullivan and Hickel rely on weak data is the least of their problems. The evidence is not relevant at all. Almost all the data that Allen and others used came from the Indo-Gangetic Basin, which did not see famine in the nineteenth century. There is nothing comparable—in fact, nothing at all—for the regions where the Deccan famines broke out.

Fourth, the nationalist criticism of food exports has long been discredited. The economist Martin Ravallion showed in a 1987 article that food exports did not expose the countryside to a food shortage. Food exports rose when Indian prices fell below world prices or after a good harvest and fell when there was a bad harvest.[5] In this way, trade stabilized domestic consumption rather than reducing it.

Fifth, that colonialism caused famines is based on flawed logic. Dryland Deccan famines disappeared after 1900, though weather shocks did not. The significance of the end of dryland famines was momentous for India. It led to a permanent fall in death rates. From 42-50 per thousand in 1911-21, the rate fell to 33-38 in the next decade, 30-32 in 1931-41, and 25 in 1941-51.

Any good theory must explain the end of famines and their occurrence jointly. Colonial apathy cannot do that because there is no good way to show that apathy ended around 1900. It is a nonsensical idea and an unverifiable one. This is why Mike Davis’s work cannot be trusted. He avoided showing how mentality changed, yet the end of famine demanded that he should.

Why did the famines really end? Michelle McAlpin in the 1980s and recently Robin Burgess and Dave Donaldson suggested that the end of famine was owed to the railways.[6] McAlpin examined the experience of the Bombay Presidency, where the second and third of the three Deccan famines had happened, and showed that markets and railways improved food distribution enough to reduce the impact of harvest failure. Burgess and Donaldson show that access to railways reduced local food price instability. In short, statistical research confirms that the railways caused the end of famines and delivered the gift of life to generations of Indians born after 1900. I have made a similar point about well water in the Deccan countryside.[7]

These works suggest a better theory of why the famines happened. The capacity of the states and the markets to provide food and water to the needy was small against the scale of the natural disasters. All large natural disasters reveal such a syndrome. They show that the capacity of the people in charge of relief can be constrained by poor information, distorted information, limited money, limited knowledge of causation, and conflict among stakeholders. Covid illustrated the play of all these things that limited the state’s capacity to cope. But Covid also showed how governments learned lessons and moved on. So did the Deccan famines.

The Raj learned lessons. The three Deccan famines generated data and research under government sponsorship on a scale not seen before. The results were famine codes (a blueprint for relief), canal construction, railways, sanitation of water bodies, cholera control, and collection of weather, crop, and water data. The effort to gain the capacity to cope delivered a sharp fall in death rates from 1901.

Droughts are, and were, common in tropical monsoon geographies. The start of a peacetime drought had nothing to do with states. But states could learn lessons and be better prepared. The Raj learned how the government could get better at managing massive weather shocks, the type to hit the Deccan at the end of the nineteenth century. Sullivan and Hickel dare not tell that story, for that would dilute their partisan message.

https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/colonialism-did-not-cause-the-indian-famines/