Burn After Reading!

My favorite contemporary public intellectual has an essay in the recent issue of The New Yorker.  The title of the piece will draw one in: Will tRump burn the evidence?

I will read it after I get the physical copy in the mail.

Corrupt regimes trying to burn the evidence is not anything new.  As always, the bastard raj perfected that too.  I remembered blogging about it, and pulled it up.  The post is from October 6, 2016.

October 6, 2016.  The election was barely a month away. 

It is shocking to now read the comments that two commenters had left.

One commenter wrote there:

Sure, the British did a lot of horrible things during the Raj. They did a little good too. ...

Forget your election. Its not as relevant as you lot think it is. You are just going to have more years of gridlock whoever "wins".

Another commenter wrote:

You seem to discount everything the British did as horrible, discriminatory, racist and evil. There has to be something positive from that time, and the positives should not be ignored completely, no matter how awful the negatives. The positives don't compensate for the negatives necessarily, but they deserve recognition as well.

Shocking!

I stand by my response there:

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln ..." applies to the White Supremacist Raj too ;) 

I don't refer to all the British then as white supremacists. But, the Raj was very much built on that notion. One of the "positives" that even people in India refer to as an example is the railway network. But that was not built out of any goodness of the heart--it was merely to make the extraction/plunder easier.

Do not put the history away so fast, my friend. Pause enough to acknowledge it. Denounce clearly the colonization. Shine the light enough on the white supremacy that messed up the lives of millions forever ... 

"Forget your election" is not something that we--you included--can afford to. The xenophobic, misogynistic, maniacal Trump's odds of winning are not good. Yes. But:

1. One can't be lax until it is all really over.

2. The nasty underbelly that Trump has exposed will not go away after his defeat. I am convinced that the nasty white supremacy will be more openly vitriolic.

Oh, yes, the bastard raj destroyed as much evidence as they could.  Read that post.  And read Jill Lepore's essay.