The following article was written for us by Taylor Dinerman, a journalist whom we occasionally borrow from the WSJ. – Ed.
Last night, a sold out crowd at the Asia Society on Park Ave and 70th Street on Manhattan’s East Side came to hear Salman Rushdie, Sukutu Mehta and Mira Kamdar speak about the Attacks on Bombay. The obvious echoes of 9/11, and the large Indian and Jewish communities in New York ensured a big turnout.
While Kamdar, an unimaginative, left wing intellectual who had lost a cousin in the attack on the Oberoi hotel and Mehta, an Associate Professor of Journalism at NYU and the author of a book on Bombay, ‘Maximum City’ shared the stage, Salman Rushdie was obviously the main attraction. He did not let his audience down.
He began by rejecting, with utter disdain, the word ‘Mumbai’. He said it was nothing but the product of a politician’s grab for power. Indeed one of the themes of the evening was the inadequacy of the Indian state as compared to the nimbleness and effectiveness of the Indian private sector. This is ironic since the almost entirely liberal crowd seems to have no problem with President-elect Obama’s plan to vastly increase US state power and to do unspeakable things to the ‘capitalists’, car owners and other evildoers, in order to save the planet.
Rushdie and the others, sang (metaphorically) hymns of praise to the vibrant, diverse, inegalitarian, port city of Bombay, the place where India meets the world and which they all agreed was the heart of India’s economic miracle. Why capitalism, greed, economic freedom and cultural commercialism should be a self evident good thing in Bombay and not in America or Europe is one of those mysteries that defy rational explanation.
The panel agreed that by striking at Bombay the terrorists were attacking the freedom and the open spirit not only of the city but of today’s global civilization. Again, its is ironic that when George W, Bush and the neocons said the same thing about the attacks in the New York, they were hooted down by a crowd that claimed that the Islamists were only responding to western ‘injustice’.
It is to Rushdie’s credit that he rejected this explanation. He put down the Islamic terrorists and their ideology by misquoting M.L.Menken’s famous definition of puritanism . What Menken wrote was “At the bottom of Puritanism one always finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world.” He then added “At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing.”
Rushdie also unambiguously put the blame for the attack on Pakistan. The panel agreed India’s western neighbor was the source of the problem, a failing state, full of fury, and armed with nuclear weapons. Of course there were the inevitable claims that America’s relationship with Islamabad and especially the CIA’s support for the Afghan Mujahedin was somehow to blame.
Of course this meme fails to acknowledge that for the first twenty years of Indian independence the US tried desperately to make friends with New Delhi. Nehru, a socialist aristocrat, rejected offers of support from capitalist peasants like Truman and Eisenhower. He and his successors preferred to embrace the pro-Soviet Non-Aligned Movement. Pakistan’s elites were quite happy to embrace America, not just as a source of weapons and economic aide, but more important as a scapegoat they could blame for just about anything that went wrong with their country.
While Kamdar was ready to damn Bush at every occasion, she was also ready to threaten Pakistan with war if they did not repress the Islamic terrorists. She also mentioned that the US would have to somehow put the issue of its supply lines to Afghanistan onto the back burner while dealing with Islamabad. This problem has gotten a lot of attention lately, but when a US General pointed out that all of NATO’s fuel for its operations there comes from Central Asia the threat of a cut off seems to have lost its urgency.
In the end, one has to feel sorry for Rushdie. He must keep his up his standing as a man of the left, but he is too smart to swallow the kool-aid. So he is a hypocrite; not a big deal, hypocrisy is universal and anyone who is not at least to some degree is an obnoxious fool. He supported the Sandanistas when they repressed Nicaraguan free speech, but now celebrates the free media of India, not to mention his own right to write offensive novels.
The attack on Bombay was the sort of thing we have seen before, in the 1970’s and 1980’s Israel suffered from the same kind of terrorism and developed an efficient coastal protection system in response. India will too, eventually.
Terrorism is a contemptible form of warfare and the panel did not bother to refer to the attackers as anything other than cowards who went after ‘soft targets’. Rushdie stressed that they were incredibly coked up, snorting and shooting and snorting and shooting, all in the name of God.
Great post Dale. And great to see you out of your science/space schtick again.
Not that I want you to stop that, mind.
Sorry to disappoint Nick… but I was merely wearing my Samizdata Editor’s hat on this one. The author is Taylor Dinerman, a sometimes MSM journalist and NYC drinking buddy.
Good post. We should do more like this, although goodness knows I don’t have the time to do more of this sort of first-hand reporting myself.
An interestingly informative article overall. But …
I note, in particular:
It worries me, and is perhaps at least part of the explanation, that greed is equated as of merit, along with capitalism and, particularly, with economic freedom.
Now, in my on-line dictionary (WordNet (r) 2.0) the definition of greed is:
Whilst I accept that many dictionaries limit their definition of greed to ‘excessive’ rather than ‘undeserved’, common usage, at least in the society I frequent, definitely includes both.
In my view it would be better, in the main posting, to use something along the lines of ‘industrious self-interest’ rather than ‘greed’.
If one is to claim truly that greed is good, and equate it as worthy as economic freedom, then one deserves (self-evidently in my view) to have one’s rationality defied.
Best regards
Nigel, “greed” in the sense that most capitalist critics use it, is a pejorative way of saying “self interest”. Greed, from the usual dictionary definition, signifies gluttony, which is unhealthy and against a person’s rational self interest.
That many people are nevertheless irrationally obsessed by material wealth at the expense of anything else, such as leisure or family life, is undeniable, but that is not of course peculiar to the market place. Under authortarian, and collectivist arrangements, one of the main examples of greed is the greed for power over other people.
However, I always liked the Gordon Gekko “greed is good” speech. Essentially, I agree with all of it. It is a shame that in the Wall Street movie that Oliver Stone made, he has Gekko later state the lie that capitalism is a “zero sum game”. It isn’t.
Nigel, and who is to decide what is ‘excessive’ anyway? At the individual level, excessive
greedself-interest can be just as destructive as excessive self-denial. So can be excessive love (and hatred can be useful and productive, as long as it is not ‘excessive’). At the societal level, all human traits are just that: integral and undeniable parts of human nature, they are neither bad nor good, the only possible exception being violence, and even that depending on the circumstances.I was quite disappointed to see The Times suddenly declare that it was going to start referring to Bombay as “Mumbai”. None of my colleagues in India call it Mumbai, not even the Marathi-speaking ones. For consistency they should start calling Dublin “Baile atha cliath”, Warsaw “Warszawa” and New York “Noo Yowak” too.
Re: hypocrisy, and Rushdie’s position on the Sandanistas
I saw Rushdie speak a few months ago on British multiculturalism as a source of terrorism, saying much the same as Mark Steyn. This report makes it look like that is his considered and consistent view.
So, as for the Sandanistas, is it too much to hope that he’s changed his mind? The hypocrisy could lie in nothing more than finding it convenient not to mention that quite a long time ago he was quite seriously wrong about something which was rather important then. Hardly the most serious – or uncommon – of sins, I’d venture to suggest.
The naming of places in other languages – and even more so in other scripts – is always going to be problematic. Look at the wide variation in how the capital of China has been rendered into English – Peking, Peiping, Beijing.
As far as I am concerned the name of a place is what the locals call it, modified as necessary to cope with transliteration from other scripts or to let me wrap my tongue around it. Sometimes for historic reasons it may be something entirely different – as with Dublin – but consistency doesn’t come into it.
The naming of Mumbai/Bombay was I always assumed part of a process of ‘Indianisation’ – an assertion of an Indian identity over the colonial one, by using an alternative transliteration. I have no particular problem with that per se, but your comment (and others at different times) seem to imply some sort of PC conspiracy. What do you think is actually going on?
Mary Contrary, anyone who does not sometimes change their mind during the course of their life is usually called a ‘fanatic’. Gawd knows I have had several ‘paradigm shifts’ over the years.
Credit to Rushdie if he has seen the light (he used to be one of my pet hates but I find much of what he says quite reasonable these days).
Calling it Mumbai instead of Bombay isn’t really related to throwing off the colonial past, it’s to do with pointless local politics; however, we assume the former which is why we fall over ourselves to comply.
In Bangalore there has been an absorbing debate about whether it should in fact be called Bengaluru. This is (arguably) a more accurate transliteration from local language Kannada, but there again a big proportion of the new population isn’t from Karnataka (or “the Carnatic”, as I won’t call it) and aren’t that keen, and it’s still stalled.
Calcutta is the one that puzzles me as it was actually founded by the Brits as Calcutta and named after a village which transliterates as “Kalikata”, so there’s not much justification for changing it to Kolkata other than vowel pronunciation changes over time (in both Bengali and English).
Still, I realise that the Indians whom I speak to about this aren’t a very representative demographic.
Webster’s (Second) New International Dictionary, the one with which I grew up (still, BTW, distinguishing between the widely-different gantlet/gauntlet), has definitions closer to the root “hunger” meaning. Webster’s Third is severely dumbed down, and should be avoided when possible; in this case it introduces a notion of reprehensibility that had only been adumbrated in Webster’s Second’s notion of excess.
Interestingly, there was a parallel negative semantic development in Latin from aveo (crave/desire) through avarus (avaritious; original meaning only poetical) to avaritia (avarice).
“Self interest” – as in working the political game to get bailouts?
“No – self interest as man as man,” Rand or some other version of Aristotelianism.
Why not just say a sense of honour?
Why twist language so that honourable conduct (which, in a world like this one, is almost bound to lead to great suffering and then death) is someone “self interest”?
Unless one says “honouring the self” I suppose.
As for economic policy.
Yes – back in the 1950’s and 1960’s Pakistan was a lot less bad than India.
Then it fell apart.
First socialism (for example the closing of Christian mission schools – not on the grounds of Christianity, but on grounds of there being private) then “Islamism” when the socialism failed.