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I watched RRR last night, a 2022 Telugu-language film directed by S. S. Rajamouli, starring two revolutionary Indian heroes of old, but re-imagined to make them meet and have cool adventures together.
It was a very fun movie. The dance numbers were quite impressive, I liked the "bromance", and the action scenes were pretty funny. Everything was pretty over-the-top, especially the British, which is why I'm writing this right now.
The British were not kind to India. I don't really know any specifics on what all horrible things they did, though I am familiar with the "Blowing from Guns in British India" painting that depicted the punishment they gave for some rebellion or other. However, even so, it is kind of odd how they portrayed the British in the movie. The movie opens with a British governor paying a few coins to purchase a child from a village because he liked how she painted and sang, and when the mother tearfully tries to stop the British convoy from leaving, a soldier is about to shoot her, but is stopped because the British governor considers Indians to not be worth the cost of the bullet. Other scenes of similar callous viciousness are common: an Indian man is brutally beaten by a British soldier because the soldier felt embarrassed and wanted to save face, the heroic sepoy who carried out the governor's orders is not promoted because only three white dudes were chosen to be promoted, or a man being flogged is made to be flogged much more than usual because the wife of the governor didn't consider him submissive enough.
The movie is really fun, but interspersed with this kind of atrocity porn, with Englishmen commonly saying that Indians are totally worthless subhuman trash, considering any Indian in the governor's palace a servant, or warning the nice British woman that cavorting with one is dangerous. It came across as an ethnic caricature. I don't think there are any British men favorably portrayed. The only British people favorably portrayed are the beautiful British women at the dance party, and the beautiful British woman who takes a liking to the protagonist. This sends the message to me "all you evil Brits, get out of India, except for your women, we'll definitely be taking those." Which, fair! That's definitely a natural inclination of many people throughout history, but it isn't really brave enough to come out and say it like that.
I was left wondering what other ethnic groups it would be appropriate to give this treatment to. I feel like if you swapped the British caricature with a caricature of any other (non-white) group of people, this movie would never have gotten so popular. People would be afraid to even mention it. I liked the movie, but I wish it didn't have this ugly portrayal in it. It made it less good. Also it was 3 hours long, what the hell.
They were incredibly kind to India as an imperial overlord.
They actually paid money to the Raj government when deploying Indian troops for imperial operations that didn't have to do with the defence of India. The cost of war would be borne by the British treasury, not the Indian treasury. India also got access to British technology and investment. When WW2 ended, India had twice the rail network of China.
In some respects India got a better deal than the US gives its allies today. Britain and Australia don't get rebates for joining in US wars in the Middle East, they get sneered at for not spending enough of their own money on 'defence'.
Who prevented Russia from gobbling up India in their southward push through Central Asia in the 19th century? Who protected India from the Japanese (world-class experts in the field of imperial cruelty)? The British, despite huge 'Quit India' protests. The Bengal Famine was mainly due to the Japanese invasion of Burma. Unsurprisingly, if rice imports from Burma are cut off and millions of refugees flee North, during a time of wartime strain, there will be problems in Bengal. Wherever the Japanese went, there was famine. Famine in the Philippines, famine in Indonesia, famine in China and famine in East India.
And we see the same incredible overgenerosity today where Indians/ex-Raj ethnicities get all kinds of special privileges in the UK - jobs that are safeguarded for non-whites, police refusing to crack down on them despite unmentionable abuses lest they seem racist. Then there's all the foreign aid they gave India post-independence.
India just finds it easier to blame Britain for everything that goes wrong, all the poverty that remains. It also helps unite the country, there's nothing so universally popular as hating and blaming outsiders. The British and Europeans generally did far more harm to China with the Opium Wars and unequal treaties (let alone the Japanese) yet China has come out well ahead of India today.
If the British were half as cruel as the Indian media likes to suggest, India would be a servile, loyal colony today. They could've liquidated Gandhi on the spot or prevented any Indian intellectual class emerging in the first place. They could've crushed any revolt with heavy-handed suppression, machine-gun fire, gas and incendiary attacks. Just imagine the amount of devastation they inflicted on rich, industrialized Germany, all the millions of men they put into the field instead redirected instead to repress India. Success would be assured. They could've used Indians as cheap labour in factories, instead they let them start their own trade unions. Britain even let Indians become the commercial class of East Africa, enjoying the fruits of empire as a subject.
I feel compelled to quote US historian Mike Davis, via Wikipedia:
It is absolutely standard, expected practice for imperial subjects to pay for things that benefit the overlord. If they rebel, it's also expected that a larger garrison of loyal troops from the metropole will be deployed there. Control of Egypt also had a great deal to do with India since much Europe-Indian trade passed through Egypt/Suez.
Upon investigating further, there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about how the home charge system actually worked, with various British commissions saying more should be done to pay rebates to India. Perhaps the repayment system was more honoured in the breach than observance. Nevertheless, the fact that there was even debate about repayment being insufficient indicates that this is not harsh imperialism.
The Mughals who previously ruled India fielded a huge army, it's hard to see how the relatively small British/Indian forces based in India, around 300,000, were unduly taxing the Indian economy. The Qing fielded a million men and embarked on their own expensive indigenous naval programs. If India weren't colonized by Britain, it would likely have undertaken similar expenditure and/or get invaded by someone, resulting in an increased fiscal burden. Russia for instance spent about 30% of its budget on the military around 1900.
Likewise, it's hard to see how a few thousand British administrators running the whole country could cause famine actively, though they were not great at stopping famine. The Raj was not run like a top-down Soviet machine, rule was largely indirect and delegated to Indians. I dispute Mike Davis's 'Late Victorian Holocausts' thesis. Firstly, it's inappropriate to compare to a Holocaust since a famine isn't an organized mass killing so much as a mildly disorganized mass not-saving. Secondly, much more severe famines were occurring right next door in China in this period. India has innately inconsistent weather via the monsoons and famines will happen in a subsistence economy.
Preventing famines isn't passive, it's active. It requires early warning, the suppression of hoarding and speculation, circulation of money so that poor people can buy grain and don't just get extorted by landlords and most importantly land reform... which the British weren't in a position to do given the size of the country and their hands-off stance. Indian food security still has not been fixed even today, hundreds of millions are stunted due to malnutrition.
It's normally the publishers who decide on book titles and subtitles, not the authors, and it's their evident interest to grab the readers' attention. I imagine the author is probably not a Holocaust 'relativist' himself.
From the same Wikipedia article:
This book explores the impact of colonialism and the introduction of capitalism during the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) related famines of 1876–1878, 1896–1897, and 1899–1902, in India, China, Brazil, Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and New Caledonia.
From the same page:
Davis argues that "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered ... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill."
The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30–60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez-faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments.
From a different article:
The regular export of grain by the colonial government continued; during the famine, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight (320,000 tons) of wheat, which made the region more vulnerable. The cultivation of alternate cash crops, in addition to the commodification of grain, played a significant role in the events.[6][7]
Fair points. However, is the main standard argument for colonial rule not the idea that it results in a higher level of flourishing and prosperity for its subjects compared to the dictatorship of their native brutish elites?
Yeah I read that part, the 'many were murdered' part and that's what made me unhappy with the thesis. OK, the British killed some people at Amritsar. That's what state killing looks like, shooting guns. Or active collectivization where they're moving people around and intensively interfering with agriculture, or in wartime when armies pass by and loot/wreck irrigation and cause famines. That's killing/murder, or at least much closer to what we mean by murder.
I don't accept that people were dying due to the ideals of Bentham. There were no Benthamite death squads, the very idea is a contradiction.
This is bad but it's not like he was sending troops to take the grain off to England. The grain export was due to the governments commitment to laissez-faire economics and practical limits on its power, as it says. The fundamental cause was that the Indian economy wasn't very developed, people who had grain didn't want to sell it to starving people who had no money, the govt had little capacity to force them to do so and didn't try very hard. So if one wants to say the British were negligent in their governance, then sure. But that's not actually murder, it's just not-saving, not-reforming the economy, not-reforming land distribution.
Colonial rule is an innately imbalanced thing, it's about a stronger side controlling a weaker. So in a purely moral level, it's never really justified if you believe in sovereignty and autonomy of peoples.
Nevertheless, in this instance I think that the British ran India quite generously as compared to other potential rulers, foreign or local. The British could've been much more extractive and heavy-handed if they wanted. It was a British former civil servant who initially organized what became the Indian National Congress because he thought they hadn't solved the country's economic problems. The meeting was approved by the Viceroy. They could've pulled a Mao and invited people to speak freely about their opinions and then arrested anyone who opposed the government. They could've had a zero-tolerance policy for dissent. They could've forced Indians into humiliation rituals like the queue hairstyle in China.
Colonialism is basically about power dynamics, that the British were at all thinking about it as 'how can we have a cordial win-win relationship rather than a I win, you submit relationship' is a sign they really weren't that evil. Just think about the different mindsets. The British have this narrative that 'colonialism was good because we kept order, built railroads' or 'colonialism was bad because we caused famines, intruded on other people's sovereignty' where it's all coached in this moral frame. Turkey doesn't really care about any of that, their official attitude towards Armenia is closer to 'it never happened and they were enemies anyway, they had it coming, we were a great empire'. No Libyan will apologize for slave-raiding the Mediterranean coast, though they have more pressing issues. The Mongols put up statues to Genghis Khan, he's a national hero to them, not a genocidal murderer.
The British were/are uniquely concerned with the well-being of their subjects as an imperial power, it follows that they weren't that bad.
Just to nitpick: it wasn't British state policy though, not even in India. The massacre wasn't ordered or sanctioned from above. The troops had no orders to disperse the protestors with lethal force.
On the other hand, the government very much had capacity to construct an inland customs barrier thousands of miles long in order to enforce the salt tax. Something doesn't add up. Also, wasn't it within the power of the government to buy up wheat and then distribute it to famine victims in order to prevent mass death? Provided they wanted a 'cordial win-win relationship' with their colonial subjects, that is?
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Amusingly, Indian nationalists and Western post-colonialists like to point to a study that shows the Bengal famine was caused by the British, because it's the only Indian famine that doesn't correlate with the monsoon conditions which have caused famine in India since time immemorial. They then turn around and blame the British for all the previous famines, too.
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