The Silk Road and Via Appia-3

outline: Silk road carried trade,exchange of ideas, culture,religion- ups and downs

Trade along the route was adversely affected by the strife which built up between the Christian and Moslem worlds. The Crusades brought the Christian world a little nearer to Central Asia, but the unified Moslem armies under Saladin drove them back again. In the Fourth Crusade, the forces of Latin Christianity scored a triumph over their Greek rivals, with the capture of Constantinople (Istanbul). However, it was not the Christians who finally split the Moslem world, but the Mongols from the east.
Whilst Europe and Western Asia were torn by religious differences, the Mongols had only the vaguest of religious beliefs. Several of the tribes of Turkestan which had launched offensives westwards towards Persia and Arabia, came to adopt Islam, and Islam had spread far across Central Asia, but had not reached as far as the tribes which wandered the vast grasslands of Mongolia. These nomadic peoples had perfected the arts of archery and horsemanship. With an eye to expanding their sphere of influence, they met in 1206 and elected a leader for their unified forces; he took the title Great Khan. Under the leadership of Genghis Khan, they rapidly proceeded to conquer a huge region of Asia. The former Han city of Jiaohe, to the west of Turfan, was decimated by the Mongols as they passed through on their way westwards. The Empire they carved out enveloped the whole of Central Asia from China to Persia, and stretched as far west as the Mediterranean. This Mongol empire was maintained after Genghis’ death, with the western section of the empire divided into three main lordships, falling to various of his descendents as lesser Khans, and with the eastern part remaining under the rule of the Great Khan, a title which was inherited from by Kublai Khan. Kubilai completed the conquest of China, subduing the Song in the South of the country, and established the Yuan dynasty.
The partial unification of so many states under the Mongol Empire allowed a significant interaction between cultures of different regions. The route of the Silk Road became important as a path for communication between different parts of the Empire, and trading was continued. Although less `civilised’ than people in the west, the Mongols were more open to ideas. Kubilai Khan, in particular, is reported to have been quite sympathetic to most religions, and a large number of people of different nationalities and creeds took part in the trade across Asia, and settled in China. The most popular religion in China at the time was Daoism, which at first the Mongols favoured. However, from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, buddhist influence increased, and the early lamaist Buddhism from Tibet was particularly favoured. The two religions existed side by side for a long period during the Yuan dynasty. This religious liberalism was extended to all.
Any history on the Silk Road would be incomplete without mention of Marco Polo. As a member of a merchant family from Venice he took the route. Starting in 1271, at the age of only seventeen, he trekked across Persia, and then along the southern branch of the Silk Road, via Khotan, finally ending at the court of Kubilai Khan at Khanbalik, the site of present-day Beijing, and the summer palace, better known as Xanadu.
postscript:
Mongol invasion was a turning point in the history of the region. Islam will fall back from what they had gained: all the turbulence,-force released by falling edifices of old beliefs, cultures muddied by trades, wars was for their taking. There was the Black Death that hit as far as Europe. Two thirds of Europe will succumb to it. History would never be the same. Islam will make a giant leap backwards and would never be the same.
(ack:http://www.ess.uci.edu/~oliver/silk.html;www.silk-road.com)
(To be Cont’d)

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The Silk Road and Via Appia-2

II
trade carried ideas,culture route-religions,Buddhism, Christianity and Islam

This region along the Silk Road was taken over by Alexander the Great of Macedon, who finally conquered the Iranian empire, and colonised the area in about 330 B.C., superimposing the culture of the Greeks. Although he only ruled the area until 325 B.C., the effect of the Greek invasion was quite considerable.

By the third century B.C., the area had already become a crossroads of Asia, where Persian, Indian and Greek ideas met. This `crossroads’ region, covering the area to the south of the Hindu Kush and Karakorum ranges, now Pakistan and Afghanistan, was overrun by a number of different peoples. After the Greeks, the tribes from Palmyra, in Syria, and then Parthia, to the east of the Mediterranean, took over the region. They had adopted the Greek language and coin system in this region, introducing their own influences in the fields of sculpture and art.
The most significant commodity carried along this route was not silk, but religion. Buddhism came to China from India this way, along the northern branch of the route. The Eastern Han emperor Mingdi is thought to have sent a representative to India to discover more about this strange faith, and further missions returned bearing scriptures, and bringing with them monks and it is pertinent to note that the Himalayan Massif, an effective barrier between China and India made Buddhism in China more derived from the Gandhara culture by the bend in the Indus river, rather than directly from India.
Christianity also made an early appearance on the scene. The Nestorian sect was outlawed in Europe by the Roman church in 432 A.D., and its followers were driven eastwards. From their foothold in Northern Iran, merchants brought the faith along the Silk Road, and the first Nestorian church was consecrated at Changan in 638 A.D. This sect took root on the Silk Road, and survived many later attempts to wipe them out, lasting into the fourteenth century.
The height of the importance of the Silk Road was during the Tang dynasty, with relative internal stability in China after the divisions of the earlier dynasties since the Han. The 754 A.D. census showed that five thousand foreigners lived in the city; Turks, Iranians, Indians and others from along the Road, as well as Japanese, Koreans and Malays from the east. Many were missionaries, merchants or pilgrims, but every other occupation was also represented. Rare plants, medicines, spices and other goods from the west were to be found in the bazaars of the city. After the Tang, however, the traffic along the road subsided.
It was at this time that the rise of Islam started to affect Asia, with the Moslems playing the part of middlemen. The sea route to China was explored at this time, and the `Sea Silk Route’ was opened, eventually holding a more important place than the land route itself.
But the final shake-up that occurred was to come from a different direction; the hoards from the grasslands of Mongolia.
(to be continued)

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The Silk Road and Via Appia

Rise of humans on the earth is a chronicle of mass migrations. Among these a road is surely a consequence of choices people make to reach their destination. In times of famine they sought places where food was in abundance. Later trade between peoples connected by roads. Road is the straight line between two points where geography has a say. In terms of geography we consider unfordable rivers, lakes and insurmountable mountains as features that stretch roads about. Of these we shall look at two roads in particular. These serve as locus for entire history of Europe and Asia to fan out. It brought about changes that none could have realized. Silk Road is one and the other is Appian Way which includes Roman road system as one whole.

The region separating China from Europe and Western Asia has Taklimakan desert, known as `Land of Death’; caravans throughout history have skirted its edges, from one isolated oasis to the next. The land surrounding the Taklimakan is equally hostile. To the northeast lies the Gobi desert, almost as harsh in climate as the Taklimakan itself; on the remaining three sides lie some of the highest mountains in the world. To the South are the Himalaya, Karakorum and Kunlun ranges, which provide an effective barrier separating Central Asia from the Indian sub-continent. Only a few icy passes cross these. Coming from the west or south, the only way in is over the passes.
On the eastern and western sides of the continent, the civilisations of China and the West developed. The western end of the trade route appears to have developed earlier than the eastern end, principally because of the development of the empires in the west, and the easier terrain of Persia and Syria.
In the west, the Greek empire was taken over by the Roman Empire. It is often thought that the Romans had first encountered silk in one of their campaigns against the Parthians in 53 B.C, and realised that it could not have been produced by this relatively unsophisticated people. The Romans obtained samples of this new material, and it quickly became very popular in Rome, for its soft texture and attractiveness. They reputedly learnt from Parthian prisoners that it came from a mysterious tribe in the east, who they came to refer to as the silk people, `Seres’. The Parthians quickly realised that there was money to be made from trading the material, and sent trade missions towards the east just as Rome sent their own agents out to explore the route, and to try to obtain silk at a lower price. In short this trade route to the East was seen by the Romans, as a route for silk rather than the other goods that were traded.

The name `Silk Road’ itself does not originate from the Romans, however, but is a nineteenth century term, coined by the German scholar, von Richthofen. The description of this route to the west as the `Silk Road’ is somewhat misleading. Firstly, no single route was taken; crossing Central Asia several different branches developed, passing through different oasis settlements. The routes all started from the capital in Changan, headed up the Gansu corridor, and reached Dunhuang on the edge of the Taklimakan.
In addition to silk, the route carried many other precious commodities. Caravans heading towards China carried gold and other precious metals, ivory, precious stones, and glass, which was not manufactured in China until the fifth century. In the opposite direction furs, ceramics, jade, bronze objects, lacquer and iron were carried. Many of these goods were bartered for others along the way, and objects often changed hands several times. There are no records of Roman traders being seen in Changan, nor Chinese merchants in Rome, though their goods were appreciated in both places. ( To be Cont’d)

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Their Shining Moment:UK conclusion

….Now, what is going to happen in the future? In future those landlords will have to contribute to the taxation of the country on the basis of the real value – only one halfpenny in the pound! Only a halfpenny! And that is what all the howling is about. But there is another little tax called the increment tax. For the future what will happen? We mean to value all the land in the kingdom. And here you can draw no distinction between agricultural land and other land, for the simple reason that East and West Ham was agricultural land a few years ago! And if land goes up in the future by hundreds and thousands an acre through the efforts of the community, the community will get 20 per cent. of that increment. Ah! What a misfortune it is that there was not a Chancellor of the Exchequer who did this thirty years ago. Only thirty years ago, and we should now be enjoying an abundant revenue from this source.

Now I have given you West Ham. Let me give you a few more cases. Take cases like Golders Green and other cases of similar kind where the value of land has gone up in the course, perhaps, of a couple of years through a new tramway or a new railway being opened. Golders Green is a case in point. A few years ago there was a plot of land there which was sold at £160. Last year I went and opened a Tube railway there.

What was the result? This year that very piece of land has been sold for £2,100 – £160 before the railway was opened – before I was there – £2,100 now. I am entitled to 20 per cent. Now there are many cases where landlords take advantage of the exigencies of commerce and of industry – take advantage of the needs of municipalities and even of national needs and of the monopoly which they have got in land in a particular neighbourhood in order to demand extortionate prices. Take the very well known case of the Duke of Northumberland when a County Council wanted to buy a small plot of land as a site for a school to train the children, who in due course would become the men labouring on his property. The rent was quite an insignificant thing.
His contribution to the rates – I forget – I think it was on the basis of 30s. an acre. What did he demand for it for a school? £900 an acre. All we say is this – Mr Buxton and I say – if it is worth £900, let him pay taxes on £900…’
Rothschild was incensed and resisted the move to tax but in the end had to accept the inevitable.
The Sun Sets over the Peers
Finally, the whole controversy over the budget and the Parliament Act contributed powerfully to the steady decline of the House of Lords and the peerage in the British system of government. In 1911 the Conservatives claimed that Asquith had virtually created one-chamber government and they therefore promised a complete reform of the composition as well as the powers of the upper chamber which would have involved some modification of the hereditary principle. Indeed, as the preamble to the Act indicated, even the Liberals regarded their reform as an interim measure not a final solution. Yet, significantly the Tory leaders failed to redeem their promise despite rank and file pressure to do so even during the inter-war period. Tacitly they accepted the marginalisation of the House of Lords and, thus, of peers in general. This was underlined in 1923 when, following the resignation of the Conservative prime minister, Andrew Bonar Law, the obvious successor, Lord Curzon, was turned down because of his membership of the upper house. Never again would a peer become prime minister, though in 1963 Lord Home achieved the impossible by renouncing his peerage and returning to the House of Commons.
Financial and Social Consequences of the Budget
Finally, it remains to assess the long-term significance of the budget for British national finance. This can best be done by looking back into the Victorian period and forward into the twentieth century. It is sobering to think that since its introduction to cope with the costs of the French Revolutionary wars the income tax had been regarded as a temporary expedient. As late as the 1870s Gladstone had proposed to abolish it. He never quite succeeded, and in the 1880s and 1890s the rate rose to eight (old) pence in the pound. By 1914 Lloyd George had pushed the standard rate up to one shilling and four pence. By the end of the First World War it stood at six shillings. During the 1920s and 1930s despite enormous political pressure, income tax was only modestly reduced to four shillings. In short, all governments came to rely heavily on income tax as the central element in national finance. Even the government of Mrs Thatcher managed totrim income tax only to 25 (new) pence, equivalent to five shillings, which was historically a high rate.
The only aspect of the 1909 budget which failed to survive was Lloyd George’s famous land taxes. The laborious process of land valuation went ahead up to 1914. But during the war his involvement in the coalition government put the whole enterprise in jeopardy. Although Lloyd George remained prime minister until 1922 he was too dependent on his Conservative colleagues to resurrect the land taxes; by 1920 they had been abandoned.
In spite of this setback, the social consequences of the Edwardian reforms were enduring. The effect of a graduated system of taxation combined with social welfare measures was to begin the process of redistributing national income from the rich to the poor, albeit slightly. This process continued in each succeeding decade regardless of changing circumstances and political parties. Not until after 1979 was the trend finally checked by reductions in taxation for very high earners and a shift to taxes on consumption paid by the poor and those on average incomes. (www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~semp/budget.htm)
benny

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Their Shining Moment:UK-the Limehouse Speech

In an address to an overflow meeting in an adjacent hall, Lloyd George defiantly declared that amendments proposed by the Lords to the Finance Bill would not be accepted. The speech was well received by his audience and by Liberal supporters throughout the country. Predictably, it provoked wrathful protests from the Unionists, and also from the King; three days later Prime Minister Asquith found King Edward VII in a state of ‘great agitation and annoyance in consequence of [Lloyd George's] Limehouse speech. I have never known him more irritated, or more difficult to appease, though I did my best’.

In preparing his Limehouse speech, Lloyd George had two principal aims: to demonstrate the justice and fairness of his Budget proposals, and to warn the Unionists of their potential vulnerability should they reject it. Limehouse itself did not cause rejection of the People’s Budget, but it did strengthen the antagonism of those already opposed to it. Its rejection by the House of Lords led to a constitutional crisis and two general elections in 1910.

J. Graham Jones
Excerpts

“…..It is rather a shame for a rich country like ours – probably the richest in the world, if not the richest the world has ever seen, that it should allow those who have toiled all their days to end in penury and possibly starvation. It is rather hard that an old workman should have to find his way to the gates of the tomb, bleeding and footsore, through the brambles and thorns of poverty. We cut a new path for him, an easier one, a pleasanter one, through fields of waving corn. We are raising money to pay for the new road, aye, and to widen it, so that 200,000 paupers shall be able to join in the march. There are so many in the country blessed by Providence with great wealth, and if there are amongst them men who grudge out of their riches a fair contribution towards the less fortunate of their fellow-countrymen they are very shabby rich men. We propose to do more by means of the Budget. We are raising money to provide against the evils and the sufferings that follow from unemployment. We are raising money for the purpose of assisting our great friendly societies to provide for the sick and the widows and orphans. We are providing money to enable us to develop the resources of our own land. I do not believe any fair-minded man would challenge the justice and the fairness of the objects which we have in view in raising this money.

But there are some of them who say, ‘The taxes themselves are unjust, unfair, unequal, oppressive notably so the land taxes’. They are engaged, not merely in the House of Commons, but outside the House of Commons, in assailing these taxes with a concentrated and sustained ferocity which will not allow even a comma to escape with its life. Now, are these taxes really so wicked? Let us examine them…
…Let us take first of all the tax on undeveloped land and on increment.
Not far from here, not so many years ago, between the Lea and the Thames you had hundreds of acres of land which was not very useful even for agricultural purposes. In the main it was a sodden marsh. The commerce and the trade of London increased under Free Trade, the tonnage of your shipping went up by hundreds of thousands of tons and by millions; labour was attracted from all parts of the country to cope with all this trade and business which was done here. What happened? There was no housing accommodation. This Port of London became overcrowded, and the population overflowed. That was the opportunity of the owners of the marsh. All that land became valuable building land, and land which used to be rented at £2 or £3 an acre has been selling within the last few years at £2,000 an acre, £3,000 an acre, £6,000 an acre, £8,000 an acre. Who created that increment? Who made that golden swamp? Was it the landlord? Was it his energy? Was it his brains – a very bad look out for the place if it were – his forethought? It was purely the combined efforts of all the people engaged in the trade and commerce of the Port of London – trader, merchant, shipowner, dock labourer, workman, everybody except the landlord. Now, you follow that transaction. Land worth £2 or £3 an acre running up to thousands. ( To be Cont’d)

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Their Shining Moment: UK- the People’s Budget of 1909

The 1909 People’s Budget was a product of then British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, introducing many unprecedented taxes on the wealthy and radical social welfare programmes to Britain’s political life. It was championed by Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and his strong ally Winston Churchill, who was then President of the Board of Trade.
According to Churchill’s biographer, William Manchester, the Budget “a revolutionary concept” because it was the first budget in British history with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the British public. It was a key issue of contention between the Liberal government and the Conservative-dominated House of Lords, ultimately leading to two general elections in 1910 and the enactment of the Parliament Act 1911.
Lloyd George’s 1909 People’s Budget was devised to bring about social reform and featured increases in income tax and excise duties, new taxes on cars, petrol and land, and a new supertax for those with incomes above £5,000.

The first speech reproduced here dates from the immediate aftermath of the Budget. It was a sensitive period; the government’s supporters had responded favourably to the Budget, but its author had to assess carefully the fighting spirit manifested by the Opposition. He well knew that A. J. Balfour, the Conservative leader, zealously eyeing the prospect of a return to power, was facing pressure from his supporters to engineer a dissolution of parliament.

Many elements in society – landowners, financiers, brewers and the licensed trade – were up in arms against the Budget.

It was against this background that on the evening of 30 July 1909, Lloyd George, fulfilling a promise made a month earlier, addressed an audience of 4,000 at the Edinburgh Castle in Limehouse, one of the poorest areas of the East End of London. There he delivered not the best, but the most famous and possibly most effective speech of his life. (ack:www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~semp/budget.htm)

(to be cont’d)
benny

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Just One Point: Hitler and Bismarck

It is ridiculous to compare Bismarck with Hitler. Only frame of reference for both names is that they were Chancellors. Their approach and their vision were as different as a surgeon’s scalpel and a machete. Bismarck who for his calculated containment of belligerent France or Russia through diplomacy would have abhorred the arrant gambler’s approach of Hitler. For posterity Bismarck was made into a myth by striking out his true statesmanship by those who wanted a war. Hitler is for posterity a question mark as how collective madness of an otherwise sober nation could create such a mediocrity for their leader?
To quote Kissinger, ‘Hitler’s was the absence of measure and rejection of restraint. The idea of conquering Europe would never have come to Bismarck; it was always part of Hitler’s vision. Hitler could never have pronounced Bismarck’s famous dictum that statesmanship consisted of listening carefully to the footsteps of God through history and walking with him a few steps of the way. Hitler left a vacuum. Bismarck left a state strong enough to overcome two catastrophic defeats..’
benny

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Transfer Factor-Human case

The American Heritage dictionary defines gene pool as thus: The collective genetic information contained within a population of sexually reproducing organisms.
In terms of human genetic make up we can understand that experience of our ancestors is passed forward and it is something like a safety-line thrown across passage of time. This support is achieved within species and not from species to another.
Nine-tenths of our genes are identical to that of a mouse. It doesn’t tell much. Neither would this: sixty percent of DNA found in the humans is also found in a banana. Where lies the mystery then?
DNA in a molecule is a genetic universe. A difference of .1 in a molecule would make some 3 million genetic differences. From such numbers Nature can give a mouse its own uniqueness as a man.
Yet Nature underwrites wellbeing of life forms on a standard that allows borrowing from species to species and from person to person.
That gene which makes a jellyfish glow can be implanted in another living thing to study its stress level.
We have organ donor programs by which organs from the brain dead can be used to replace the organs diseased and give new lease of life to the living. Like tissue match between persons so grafting a part of healthy skin onto replace the damaged skin by burns in another faulty heart valves of man can be replaced from animals as well. It would seem then for such procedures to succeed there must be a common ground?
Transfer factor is where a particular protein has the ability to recognize a disease and activate body’s immune system. So it will not catch it a second time. In Transfer factor we see how this immunity can be passed from person to another.

Outbreak of AIDS epidemic has been the scrouge of the present century. Yet is has a chilling parallel to the waves of Black Death that devastated Europe earlier. The strange case of Steve Crohn from California attests to the timelessness of experience. His lover Jerry succumbed to the epidemic and died on March 4,1982. He was the fourth victim to die of AIDS. Steve however remained immune to it, which seemed curious to the scientists. Steve’s blood carried HIV virus, 3000 times more than needed to infect a healthy cell and yet he remained healthy. Something was blocking the virus from getting in. He had a blocking system identified as Delta 32. It was traced out to his ancestry. His European ancestors carried this mutant gene as a result of the Black Death and they had brought it to the New World. Like Steve there are 1% of people in U.K and the U.S.A, carrying the gene.
In terms of use and experience transfer factor would indicate a long range view of things is Nature’s game plan. Old Medieval idea of God sending Attila the Hun as a scourge for persecuting Christians is not borne by facts. Rome had it coming and it took slow in maturing and from many chain of events connecting the fall of Rome was that of a power structure that could not handle a vast empire. But the excellence of Imperial Rome, its Law, literature, art, technology will travel further under many guises. Civic Architecture of Washington. DC is a telling example.
Imperial Rome riding the baggage train of other world powers was nothing new. But for Hellenism that Alexander the Great centered around Egypt (Alexandria) Syria,Persia and Macedon ancient Greece would not had such an impact on the West. . Rome in her ascendancy borrowed Greek ideals as her own. Just as Greece did in her days.
Archaeological evidences show assimilation of influences from Syro- Hittite, Assyrian, Phoenician and Egyptian cultures. The Archaic Greece came into focus with the sudden end of the Mycenaean culture. Cosmos as one will make both human excellence and evil go under many guises according the necessities of the age and change shapes. Thus if war did glorify might of kingdoms and added prestige to the bandit-kings who led the plunder it would another time will be waged for ‘the king and country’.

benny

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Search for Atlantis-Eternal India: Conclusion

Assassination and Aftermath-Walter Rathenau

On June 24, 1922, two months after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo, 1922, Walter Rathenau was assassinated in a plot led by two ultra-nationalist army officers, Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer. Also involved were Ernst Verner Techow, Hans G. Techow and Wille Guenther (aided and abetted by seven others, some of them schoolboys) linked to Organisation Consul. On that morning, he was driving from his house to Wilhelmstraße, as he did daily (and predictably). During the trip his car was passed by another in which three armed men were sitting. They simultaneously shot at the minister with machine guns, and threw a hand grenade into the car before quickly driving away. A memorial stone in the Koenigsallee in Berlin-Grunewald marks the scene of the crime. Rathenau was fervently mourned in Germany, with flags officially at half mast, although this was not compulsory. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, they declared Rathenau’s assassins to be national heroes and designated June 24 as a holiday of celebration.
One of the participant assassins was the future writer Ernst von Salomon, who had provided the car but was not present at the shooting. The main assassins, Kern and Fischer, committed suicide when surrounded by the police in the turret of Saaleck castle, near Koesen. The final main assassin, Ernst Werner Techow, who drove the car, was captured and sentenced to 15 years in prison. At his trial he claimed that he had acted under duress, as Kern threatened to kill him when he tried to withdraw from the murder plot. Upon his release from prison for good behavior in 1927, he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. During the Second World War he helped save hundreds of Jews in Marseilles, apparently as an attempt at penance for his crime.
Telushkin, Joseph (1994). Jewish Wisdom. New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0688129587. “After Techow’s arrest, Mithilde Rathenau, the victim’s mother, wrote to Techow’s mother: In grief unspeakable, I give you my hand… Say to your son that…I forgive [him], even as God may forgive [him], if before an earthly judge your son makes a full and frank confession…and before a heavenly judge repents… May these words give peace to your soul… . Techow later told Rathenau’s nephew that his transformation had been triggered by Mathilde Rathenau’s letter: Just as Frau Rathenau conquered herself when she wrote that letter of pardon, I have tried to master myself.”
Here we see mother’s response different from men. Nazis eulogized the killing of a man who could have saved Germany from the brink of economic collapse. For them all that mattered was to bury the Weimar Republic. Why was it hated? The government ruled on democratic lines and had no magic bullet as the Marxists and Nazis deluded themselves. Lawless men made matters murky so they could fish in troubled waters. Whereas mother of the murdered Walter Rathnau reached out to the mother of the assassin and in doing so she redeemed ‘the unwilling assassin’ and made him a useful member of the society. Women connect while man think nothing but glory and power.
This brings me to the concluding part of the three part series I have been posting lately on India.
Assassination of Rathenau sent Germany to the abyss and Germany survived because the nation found there are better ways of achieving miracle than some outdated ideology based in Teutonic myths and legends. Aryan racial superiority was a myth; and so was war. Does this hold a lesson for India?
I wonder what India would have been had not some Ultra-nationalist assassinated Gandhi in the critical juncture of a new nation finding feet?
In India ultra-nationalists may have taken a leaf out of National Socialists in the way they drill, parade and street rowdism. Instead of Swastika they wear a tilak as though it is a proof of our Indian identity! Instead of Aryan supremacy they have merely replaced it with ‘Hindu Nation’.
Indians see through phony nationalism whether it was by courtesy of KB Hedgwar or Anna Hazare. Heart of these ‘nationalists’ one would find ‘caste India’ and not secular India. ( ack:wikipedia)
benny

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Integration Principle

Just as the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk were experimenting with their aeroplane (1903), in Germany Count Zeppelin was well advanced into rigid airships filled with hydrogen.( Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin became interested in constructing a “Zeppelin balloon” after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, where he witnessed the French use of balloons to transport mail during the early part of the war. He had also encountered Union Army balloons in 1863, during the American Civil War, where he was a military observer.)
During the early stages of WWI Germany did not have as many ships as British Royal Navy had; so the Zeppelins were used as an aerial eye to monitor the movements of the enemy ships and warn the German fleet accurately. From there it progressed to drop bombs since the airships could travel great distances, and higher, beyond the range of stationary English antiaircraft guns. At the outbreak of war English defenses relied almost entirely on the Army and Navy. The lack of an adequate Air Command allowed Germany to take the initiative during the early course of the war. In 1915 Zeppelins successfully raided the English airspace and carried out a number of indiscriminate attacks on civilian population. By January 1916 the English scored their first victory by shooting down a Zeppelin on an English countryside. Once Great Britain gained enough airplanes and pilots the inherent weaknesses of the Zeppelin soon showed up. Inflammable hydrogen made every hit an inferno from which the Germans ould not escape. Soon Imperial Germany grounded the dirigibles forever.
Germany carried war into the air but within a quarter of century aerial warfare would become an indivisible part of any onslaught. Without which could Japan have taken on the USA by dealing a ‘knock-out’ blow at the Pearl Harbor?
Can we now think of a war without the air support? No. Our experience in a century had overshot the bank of experience of our forefathers. For ever.
Integration principle ties up London, Rotterdam, Dresden, Hiroshima Nagasaki and Baghdad.
Integration principle explains how good and evil that man devises will spread past the barrier man sets out. The Manhattan Project was higly classified and the USA did not imagine it would fall in the hands of the Soviet Russia. But it did.
One of the scientists Karl Fuchs was involved with the Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
As Fuchs later testified, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 he concluded that the Soviets had a right to know what the United Kingdom (and later the United States) were working on in secret. Hence he began transmitting military intelligence to the USSR, though the historical record is unclear about exactly when he started. Fuchs’s testimony confirms that he contacted a former friend in the Communist Party of Germany, who put him in touch with someone at the Soviet embassy in Britain. The rest is history. By the way his code-name was Rest.
Then there is the ubiquitous hand AQ Khan who was too free cutting and pasting nuclear secrets on the internet with the connivance of his country. Was A Q Khan prompted by greed or because he wanted the Muslim states also have nuclear capabilities? From Syria to North Korea anyone could have made a pile of nuclear arsenal if had chance. Integration principle connects conscientious objector and a mischief-maker as much as nations the US and the ‘axis of evil’.
benny

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