Tanroop > Recent Status Updates

The work of activists like Jaswant Singh Khalra, who investigated "mass cremations of militants who had 'disappeared' during the insurgency" and who was murdered by the Punjab police in 1995, suggest that the "conservative estimate of thirty thousand deaths during the insurgency after 1984 need to be revised upwards. Even today, there are no agreed figures on the overall death rate that include the 'disappeared'."

"Our Oppositional movement in Russia had not been Trotskyist, since we had no intention of attaching it to a personality, rebels as we ourselves were against the cult of the leader... 10 years later, tiny parties [abroad]... termed him "our glorious leader", and any person in the 4th Int'l who went so far as to object to his propositions was promptly expelled and denounced in the same language...employed against us"

"Increased commercialization since the Song had elevated the social status of shopkeepers and artisans...This trend had parallels in other commercialized regions around the world," like 17th C England or Tokugawa Japan." "Such similarities appear uncanny, insofar as they emerged without direct intellectual correspondence, [but] what united these authors was their shared experience of commercialization."

Trotsky's errors in judgement came from the fact that he "still envisaged all social classes and groups in action and motion, in a state of self-reliance and animation, ready to jump at one another and fight their titanic battles. His thought was baffled at the sight of Titans drowsy and indolent whom a bureaucracy could tame and tie hand and foot."

A panicked Bukharin told Kamenev that "Stalin drew the conclusion that the further socialism advanced, the stronger would popular resistance to it become, a resistance which only firm leadership could hold down. 'This meant a police state', Bukharin commented...the party was on the brink of an abyss: if Stalin were to win, not a shred of freedom would be left... 'He will slay us, He will strangle us'."

"These millions of lives past, present, and future, these structures newly arisen from ancient edifices and followed themselves by structures yet to be born, seemed to succeed each other in time like waves; by chance it was at my feet that night that this great surf swept to shore"

"Surrounded by a hostile or, at best, indifferent world Russia stood alone, bled white, starving, shivering with cold, consumed by disease, and overcome with gloom. In the stench of blood and death her people scrambled wildly for a breath of air, a faint gleam of light, a crust of bread. 'is this', they asked, 'the realm of freedom? Is this where the great leap has taken us?'"

Defending the Opposition at a Party Conference, Kamenev "broke into these words, part warning and part self-consolation: 'You may accuse us, comrades, of what you like, but we do not live in the middle ages! Witch trials cannot be staged now...You cannot burn us at the stake.'..Exactly ten years later Kamenev was to sit in the dock at a witch trial", and was executed by firing squad shortly after

"The issues were further confused by the peculiar, scholastic style in which the controversies were conducted. For parallels we should have to look at that medieval literature where theologians argued how many angels could sit on a pin-head or to the Talmudic disputes over which came first, the egg or the hen."

"There is always a day when Atlas ceases to support the weight of the heavens, and his revolt shakes the Earth."

"Bolshevism has no enemy more fundamental and irreconcilable than American capitalism.' These were 'the two basic and antagonistic forces of our age'. Whenever communism might advance, it would run into barriers set up by American capitalism; and in whatever part of the world the United States might seek to expand, it would be confronted by the threat of proletarian revolution"

Sikh leaders drew "from the Swiss example of power-sharing. By foregrounding minority rights, they identified the need for political autonomy that was so central to their tradition, which, they said, aspired 'never to dominate or accept the domination of another...'"
But, if partition was inevitable, 'The Sikh demand', Master Tara Singh insisted, 'is that Punjab is our homeland, our sacred land, our body and soul."

"We are still soldiers on the march. We have a day of rest. We must wash our shirts, cut and brush our hair, and first of all clean and grease our rifles. All our present economic and cultural work is nothing but an attempt to bring ourselves into some sort of order between two battles and two marches...Our epoch is not the epoch of a new culture. We can only force open the gate to it."

"Madhyabitta (middle-class), then, was aspiration rather than reality, but aspiration can also be crucially important In the making of historical processes. Nor, it must be added, was the anomaly all that unique. The Indian colonial middle class of literati, aspiring but generally failing to achieve a class status not their own- at times 'substituting' for the missing or dominant class- would have a number of...

"Today, thirty or so rebels were killed by gunfire or bombs in the backcountry.

But still no war, no, not that. Power minds its language- its fatigues tailored from satin, its butchery smothered by propriety."

"The Party was in danger of losing its proletarian-socialist outlook, in danger of 'degeneration', no matter whether it entrusted its future to the mass of members or to the Old Guard. The predicament arose from the fact that the majority of the nation did not share the socialist outlook, that the working class was still disintegrated, and that, the revolution [had] failed to spread to the West."

Crying in Tesco

Photography "has been described as offering a new lining to the human brain...Through photography Europe could provide itself with a visual representation of the remodelling of the world through economic and political control."

"Institutions which have died as creeds sometimes continue, nevertheless to survive as habits."

"Nietzsche’s Supermen were Supermen by reason of their worth. Nietzsche was a genuine distinterested philosopher. Manu, on the contrary, was a hireling engaged to propound a philosophy which served the interests of a class, born in a group and whose title to being Superman was not to be lost even if they lost their virtue."

"Real liberty of action exists only where exploitation has been annihilated, where no suppression of one class by another exists, where there is no unemployment, no poverty and where a person is free from the fear of losing his job, his home and his food as a consequence of his action."

"The cold truth is that the British massacre at Amritsar which ignited the first great mass movement of the independence struggle was a bagatelle compared with the accumulated slaughter by the Indian Army and paramilitary forces of their fellow-citizens, or those deemed such, since independence. "

"In 1958, Nehru’s regime enacted perhaps the most
sanguinary single piece of repressive legislation in the annals of liberal
democracy, the Armed Forces Special Powers Regulation...With this license to murder, Indian troops and paramilitaries were guaranteed immunity from atrocities, and made ample use of it."

Made me lol: "as a political leader, [Gandhi's] conception of himself as a vessel of divine intention allowed him to escape the trammels of human logic or coherence. Truth was not an objective value – correspondence to reality, or even (in a weaker version) common agreement – but simply what he subjectively felt at any given time. ‘It has been my experience’, he wrote, ‘that I am always true from my point of view’.'"

"The government of India could not seem to check the growth of violence, with various indications that Anticolonial violence was morphing in its modality, making it harder to predict and detect...This rise in political violence injected an overdose of anxiety into British residents India, greatly undermining 'the pleasure of ruling', as Bhagat Singh himself noted."

"Lenin had said that N.E.P. had been conceived 'seriously and for long'; and the opponents of planning often quoted the saying. 'Yes, seriously and for a long time', Trotsky retorted, 'but not for ever. We have introduced N.E.P. in order to defeat it on its own ground and largely by its own methods. By making effective use of the laws of the market economy...and also by intervening through our state-owned industry"

Deutscher might just be one of the best writers I've ever read

"The clock at Anarkali Chowk had gotten stuck at 5 past 7. Time had stopped. Its feet were stuck. The pendulum was silent, and forlorn. Maybe it was ruminating upon something. Maybe it was wondering about what had happened? The handcuffs of the centuries-old captives were finally off. They were free to indulge in the macabre dance of blood and fire...Maybe history had made a mistake?"