Yifei Sun > Recent Status Updates

The agreements acknowledged the authority of the local ruler, who in turn ceded part of that authority to the imperial power, often including control over the country’s external trade or natural resources”

“The most common method of controlling territories without incurring the degree of opposition and expense that came with immediate annexation had come to be called ‘protecting’ them. When the British government of India extended its empire to incorporate Ottoman territories of the Persian Gulf, it signed protection agreements with local emirs similar to those it had previously made with the princely states of India.

Its military occupation could then be justified as necessary to support the self-determination of the European settlers, and to mediate the conflict that resulted as the settlers attempted to acquire Palestinian lands.”

“Britain had originally planned to retain only the Palestinian port of Haifa, using the enclave as the terminus for a railway or pipeline to carry oil from Iran to the Mediterranean.4 As it became clear that Palestinians’ opposition to the seizure of their territory would require a larger military presence, Britain had opted to support the Zionist project to build up a Jewish colony in Palestine.

“The first part continued under the name of ‘selfdetermination’, or what Lord Milner, who served as British secretary of state for the colonies after the war, called the attempt to ‘rule subject races through their chiefs’; ”

and to stop imperial interests from financing revolution, as they were reported to have done in the revolutions of 1908 in Turkey and 1911 in Mexico – a reference in the former case to the oil interests represented by Ernest Cassel, and in the latter to the role of Standard Oil. The League was to be an economic mechanism to replace, not war between states, but its taproot – the conflict over material resources

The League or its member governments would monitor these investments to prevent slavery, sweating or the systematic ill-treatment of workers; to prevent usurious lending to states, as happened with the loans to Egypt, Turkey and Morocco, whose failure had triggered the sequence of events leading to the current world crisis;

As an economic structure, the League that Brailsford and other socialists proposed would be ‘a permanent authority. . . to internationalize the export of capital’. It would manage competition for concessions, control essential trade routes, ship canals and free ports, and allocate shares according to agreed proportions for investment in all mineral and railway concessions.

“While organising the struggle of the Indian community against the labour and immigration laws that Smuts had introduced in the Transvaal, Mohandas Gandhi had begun to articulate a different claim of swaraj, or self-rule, defined not as the political independence of the state but as the cooperative self-sufficiency of the community, to be won through the methods of passive resistance”

This whole, the universal and divine understanding, in unity with which we are logical, is, according to Heraclitus, the essence of truth. Hence that which appears as the universal to all, carries with it conviction, for it has part in the universal and divine Logos, while what is subscribed to by an individual carries with it no conviction from the opposite cause.

From his principle that everything that is, at the same time is not, it immediately follows that he holds that sensuous certainty has no truth; for it is the certainty for which something exists as actual, which is not so in fact. Not this immediate Being, but absolute mediation, Being as thought of, Thought itself, is Thought is the true being

They are not themselves process, but fire is process; and thus he maintains fire to be the elementary principle, and this is the real form of the Heraclitean principle, the soul and substance of the nature­process. Fire is physical time, absolute unrest, absolute disintegration of existence, the passing away of the "other," but also of itself;

To Heraclitus the truth is to have grasped the essential being of nature, i.e. to have represented it as implicitly infinite, as process in itself; and consequently it is evident to us that Heraclitus could not say that the primary principle is air, water, or any such thing.

It is not that time is or is not, for time is non­being immediately in Being and Being immediately in non­being: it is the transition out of Being into non­being, the abstract Notion, but in an objective form, i.e. in so far as it is for us.

''what coincides and what conflicts, what is harmonious and what discordant, and from out of them all comes one, and from one, all."

For Heraclitus says: "Everything is in a state of flux; nothing subsists nor does it ever remain the same." And Plato further says of Heraclitus: "He compares things to the current of a river: no one can go twice into the same stream,"1 for it flows on and other water is disturbed.

"Being and non­being are the same; everything is and yet is not." The truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and, indeed, of the pure opposition of being and non­being; but with the Eleatics we have the abstract understanding that Being is alone the truth. We say, in place of using the expression of Heraclitus, that the Absolute is the unity of being and non­being.

If we put aside the Ionics, who did not understand the Absolute as Thought, and the Pythagoreans likewise, we have the pure Being of the Eleatics, and the dialectic which denies all finite relationships. Thought to the latter is the process of such manifestations; the world in itself is the apparent, and pure Being alone the true.

If Aristotle says that Zeno denied movement because it contains an inner contradiction, it is not to be understood to mean that movement did not exist at all.

The ordinary ideas of science, where propositions result from proof, proof is the movement of intelligence, a connection brought about by mediation. Dialectic is either (a) external dialectic, in which this movement is different from the comprehension of the movement, or (b) not a movement of our intelligence only, but what proceeds from the nature of the thing itself, i.e. from the pure Notion of the content.

the more backward races’, such as the people of Egypt or India, were to be included in the imperial Commonwealth ‘for the very reason that they are as yet unable to govern themselves’.12 Without the presence of a European minority, these progressive imperialists argued, no non-European people could be trained for a future role in their own government

Alfred Milner, the high commissioner for southern Africa, and the young administrators he recruited, hoped to transform Britain’s colonies into a commonwealth of self-administered territories.

We here see a dialectic which may be called metaphysical reasoning, in which the principle of identity is fundamental. "The nothing is like nothing and does not pass into Being or conversely; thus nothing can originate from like." This, the oldest mode of argument, holds its place even to the present day, as, for example, in the so­ called proof of the unity of God.

As to his philosophy, Xenophanes in the first place maintained absolute existence to be the one, and likewise called this God. "The all is One and God is implanted in all things; He is unchangeable, without beginning, middle or end."