-Caveat Lector-
Treason in America -- From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman
ANTON CHAITKIN (C)1984
New Benjamin Franklin House
P. O. Box 20551
New York, New York 10023
ISBN 0-933488-32-7
--[13a]--
PART III
The Reform of America by Her Enemies
-13-
>From the British East India Company to Emerson, Carlyle, and Marx
Treason: 1. Violation of allegiance towards one's country or sovereign, esp.
the betrayal of one's own country by waging war against it or by consciously
and purposely acting to aid its enemies.
In each mouth Satan mangled with his teeth
A sinner, each jaw moving like a brake
So that three wretches anguished as he chewed.
He of the front mouth less from the biting writhed
Than from the flaying of the angry claws;
His back was stripped and stripped again of flesh.
"Yon soul above who suffers greatest pain
Is Judas," so my master's voice affirmed.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno
The American Union had been rescued and re-established by the profound
mobilization of our people by President Abraham Lincoln from 1861 to 1865.
More than 2.5 million men fought for the Union, taken from a population, in
the loyal states, of 22 million. When Eastern bankers had denied Lincoln the
credit needed to finance the war, the President had created a new national
banking system, printed 400 million new greenback dollars, and raised
government spending by 600% to $300 million per year.
A system of strict tariffs and preferential buying had been put into effect,
so as to force new industry into existence. Government-sponsored railroad
construction had been undertaken with a view to opening the vast continent to
industry, agriculture, and new cities.
At the victorious conclusion of the Civil War, the President had been
assassinated. But the spirit of national optimism�the feeling that we could
accomplish anything necessary for national progress, would determine the
political and social developments in the United States and much of the world
for the remainder of the nineteenth century.(1)
At war's end, the United States had the largest and best army in the world.
Over the next 20 years of peace; the American economy expanded at
unbelievable rates, until America became, suddenly, the world's industrial
leader. Between 1866 and 1887, operating railroads grew by 400% to 150,000
miles; American steel output, nurtured by Lincoln's legal framework, grew by
2000% to 340,000 tons per year.
Having failed to terminate the American Union in the insurrection of 1861,
the enemy British and allied oligarchs now faced an invigorated nation,
standing forth as a universal model and guide for the potential defeat of
oligarchism and backwardness. The world had seen the U.S.A. use Hamilton's
concept of national sovereignty over the economy, and the revival of Benjamin
Franklin's tradition of rationalism and alerted citizenship, to win
unprecedented military and civil triumphs.
Responding to this renewed threat to their existence, the old European
oligarchy created a great series of "reform" movements to block America's
progress. In the course of a half-century following the Civil War
(1866-1916), these reformers stopped our economic growth and seized control
of the finances, politics, and culture of our country. In the period since
the First World War, this "Eastern Establishment" has nearly succeeded in
eliminating the very idea of America, and its special purpose, from the minds
of living Americans.
We will attempt to show a sort of family history of the "reformers," and the
development of the anti- American machine they have created within the United
States. If the story is properly told, those who hear it will not be
surprised at the behavior of those who favor Khomeini, Qaddafi, and the
Soviet leadership over the United States, but will be prepared to retire them
from action.
Treason against a republic is the greatest crime, because the nation's past
achievements are defiled and buried, the present strivings of its statesmen
and citizens are ruined, and the future greatness of its children may be
prevented forever, their lives thrown away.
Whatever may be the immediate motivation for treason, the traitor typically
approaches his acts from the standpoint of a thoroughly criminal mind,
consciously reflecting on a variety of great crimes already committed.
This is a story of treason against the American republic, and thus, because
of America's unique power and promise, treason against all of humanity. We
shall see a remarkable connectedness between the perpetrators in different
times and places, and in what might have seemed diverse planes of activity.
Most notable, and not at all surprising, is the fact that the planners and
sponsors of the treason always prove to have some important connection to a
particular massive crime the destruction of the populations of Asia l!y the
British East India Company.
The relationship of Western European civilization to the nonwhite people of
other continents, so besmirched by a record of enslavement and looting, will
remain the central problem of our time should we survive the present threat
of devastation from the East.
Britain's Asian empire- the "nursery" for the traitors and gangsters with
whom we will deal in Part III�presents the historical investigator with
unexplored territory, in a certain sense. Accounts of this bloody epoch (like
those of Africa and Ibero-America) generally fall into one of two categories:
apologies written or commissioned by the guilty parties themselves; or
polemics by Marxists and others which fail to differentiate the crimes from
Western civilization itself (and thereby fail to inquire into the peculiar
nature and role of the perpetrators back within Western society).
But crimes against the Indians and Chinese were also treason against England
itself�a betrayal of the Mediterranean Renaissance civilization which England
had further developed and in some ways still represented; a betrayal which
could potentially be punished and corrected.
This is a story of corruption on a scale unimaginable up to that time, the
controllers and benefactors of which then turned for plunder to the United
States, while clamoring for an end to the "corruption" of those who stood in
their way.
The British East India Company was begun in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth
granted a charter to certain London-based merchants to trade in the East,
following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Over the years this
private company was given monopoly privileges with respect to trade in India,
in return for which the oligarch-adventurers paid millions of pounds sterling
(a fraction of their revenues) into the public treasury back home.
In the first two centuries the British competed with other European traders
throughout Asia (among the competitors, the Dutch were the most notorious for
cruelty and disregard for human life, as reflected by Jonathan Swift's
treatment of the Dutch sea captain, more bestial than animals, in Gulliver's
Travels).
The Company established trading strongholds in certain coastal areas of
India, building up a private army which contested with French forces and
native armies in the latter 1700s for "trading rights" and political power
over coastal regions.
Methods of control and looting were learned first in the consolidation of the
Company's hold over Bengal, in the northwest, later to be applied to the
entire subcontinent.
Mir Jafar was established as the puppet Nawab of Bengal in1757. In return for
this favor, and the continued support of the Company's army, Mir Jafar agreed
to give �1,000,000 out of the province's taxes to the East India Company,
�500,000 to the English inhabitants of Calcutta, and "large gifts" to various
officials of the company.
A British Parliamentary committee(2) estimated that �1,238,575 in gifts were
distributed, and that British military commander Robert Clive had received
�31,500 and an estate worth �27,000 -per year. Clive, whose army had
conquered the province against 50,000 native defenders, reported to
the-committee that "the Nabob's generosity made my fortune easy." Clive
received a total of at least �234,000 from Mir Jafar.(3)
Three years later, in 1760, Mir Jafar was deposed and replaced by Mir Kasim,
who rewarded his sponsors with �200,000 in gifts, including �58,333 to the
Company's Bengal Governor, Henry Vansittart, and contributed �50,000 to the
Company's wars in South India.
In 1763, Mir Jafar was reinstated, paying �500,165 for the privilege. He died
two years later, and his illegitimate son became "ruler," distributing
�230,356 in gifts.
The typical Company official, who might survive opium addiction, drunkenness,
and venereal disease, would return to England as a massively wealthy
individual. Former East India men were known as "nabobs," who paraded their
plunder and openly bought seats in Parliament.
The Company had come to India with the announced purpose of buying and
selling merchandise. But the great fortunes of Company officials and
stockholders were secured by theft� forced sale or purchase, and outright
"tax collecting."
The Company itself, as well as its officials acting in their own private
capacities, made themselves middlemen for most commercial transactions in
Bengal--and later all of India. Indian weavers were forced to sell their
wares to the East India men. The competition was gradually wiped out, as
native merchants were compelled to purchase their stocks of goods from the
English. "Various and innumerable" were the methods of compulsion "practiced
by the Company's agents . . . such as by fines, imprisonments,
floggings...."(4)
The tax collectors for the once-powerful Mughal emperors were given contracts
for the collection of taxes payable to the Company, which came from the small
landholding peasants in the form of an ever-larger share of their crops. As
the Bengali peasants fell behind in their crop payments, their land would be
confiscated and sold at auction, or, as a last resort, their seed grains
would be taken from them.
The figures in the accompanying chart(5) show that the American colonists
were not the only ones suffering under the oppression of British taxation at
this time.
LAND-REVENUE TAXES IN THE PROVINCE OF BENGAL
Fiscal Year Regime
Collection
(�)
1762-63 Mir Kasim
646,000
1763-64 Mir Jafar
762,000
1764-65 Mir Jafar
818,000
1765-66 Dual Government 1,470,000
(1770: famine kills third of inhabitants)
1771-72 Dual Government 2,341,941
1772-79 Company Direct Rule 2,577,078
(avg)
1790-91 Company Direct Rule 2,680,000
R.C. Dutt describes the consequences of these policies on the exhausted
population:
�Early in 1769 high prices gave an indication of an approaching famine, but
the land-tax was more rigorously collected than ever.... Late in the year the
periodical rains ceased prematurely, and the Calcutta Council in their letter
of the 23rd November to the Court of Directors anticipated a falling off of
the revenues, but specified no relief measures to be undertaken. On the 9th
May 1770 they wrote: 'The famine which has ensued, the mortality, the
beggary, exceed all description....' On the 11th September they wrote: 'It is
scarcely possible that any description could be an exaggeration of the misery
the inhabitants . . . have encountered with. It is not then to be wondered
that this calamity has had its influence on the collections; but we are happy
to remark that they have fallen less short than we supposed they would.' "
The official British estimate was that *one third of the people of Bengal
under their control, or 10 million out of the 30 million inhabitants, died in
the famine of 1770.*(6)
R.C. Dutt quotes Warren Hastings, the Governor of Calcutta, in a letter to
the East India Company Directors in November 1772:
Notwithstanding the loss of at least one-third of the inhabitants of the
province, and the consequent decrease of the cultivation, the net collections
of the year 1771 exceeded even those of 1768.... It was naturally to be
expected that the diminution of the revenue should have kept an equal pace
with other consequences of so great a calamity. That it did not was owing to
its being violently [sic] kept up to its former standard.(7)
Warren Hastings is called "a firm and wise peace-time administrator" by
author Brian Gardner in The East India Company.(8)
There had been famines in India from time to time, over the centuries of
invasions of the subcontinent since the higher Indian culture collapsed in
the first millennium of the Christian era. But under British rule, the
systematic withdrawal of resources and, as we shall see, the systematic and
calculated destruction of native Indian manufacturing capabilities,
inevitably resulted in uncontrollable, persisting famines and proneness to
disease a condition that continued until the independent Indians were able to
organize their own production in the 1960s and 1970s.
Toward the end of the American War for Independence, the political circles
associated with the British East India Company took nearly complete control
over British political affairs. A new government was headed by Prime Minister
William Petty, the Earl of Shelburne, who negotiated the peace treaty with
the United States, and directed the British intelligence services in complex
worldwide tasks of conquest and subversion.
A Board of Control for the Affairs of India was set up in London. Henry
Dundas, political boss of Scotland and Shelburne's "dirty operations" chief,
was officially President of the Board from 1793 to 1801. Unofficially, Dundas
controlled Indian operations almost entirely for 30 years, from the time in
1787 when he proposed that Indian opium be poured into China as an instrument
of war and looting. Dundas is also to be remembered for his role as the
"Satan-ritualist" intelligence official to whom the two famous spies, Aaron
Burr and Francisco Miranda, reported in England.
The British now geared up for a military offensive throughout Asia. Lord
Cornwallis, who had surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, was
appointed Commander in Chief and Governor General of India.
But it was not until the military campaigns of 1797 to 1803, under the
leadership of the brothers Richard, Henry, and Arthur Wellesley, that the
British East India Company finally subdued and controlled-the entire
subcontinent of India. Based on this exploit, Arthur Wellesley was created
the Duke of Wellington and later gained fame for the defeat of Napoleon.
By the 1820s, the East India Company had a standing army of over a
quarter-million troops, and a navy patrolling the seas from the Southwestern
Pacific to the Persian Gulf. This was the largest armed force in the world.
Between 1803 and 1857, this army engaged in a series of wars against restive
Indians and neighboring Asian people, with casualties in the millions.
Among these conflicts the apologetic Brian Gardner names the following:
Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803-1805); Anglo-Nepalese War (1814-1816); Pindari
and Maratha Wars (18161818); First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826); First
Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842); Sind War (1843); Second Anglo-Sikh War
(1848-1849); Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852-1853).(9)
In addition, the British fought the French in India from 1804 to 1815, sent
troops to China to crush resistance to the sale of opium in 1841, and waged
barbarous warfare against a revolt of nearly all of India in 1857.
A new mode of looting followed necessarily upon the conquest of the Indian
subcontinent�the old methods would be insufficient to finance the cost of the
military adventures on such a scale. Tariffs were imposed against the import
of Indian textiles and garments into Great Britain, ranging from 70% up to
400% of the price of the products. At the same time, British authorities held
the tariffs in India to a nominal 2.5%.
The Indian manufacturing sector chiefly fine cotton and silk goods, was
swiftly destroyed. From 1818 to 1836 the export of cotton twists from Great
Britain to India rose 5,200 times. The export of British muslins to India
went from 1 million to 64 million yards between 1824 and 1837. Whereas in
1813, Calcutta had exported to London �2,000,000 in cotton goods, in 1830
Calcutta imported �2,000,000 in British cotton goods and ceased exporting. By
1850, total exports from Great Britain and Ireland to India were �8,024,000,
of which cotton goods amounted to �2,220,000.(10)
Indian weavers, who had once supplied Europe and Asia with the finest cloths,
now disappeared from world commerce.
To pay for the imports, the British developed vast opium plantations in
India, and, largely under expert Scotch supervision, smuggled the illegal,
poison drug into China. The East India Company sold licenses for the export
of opium, the revenues for which rose from �728,517 in fiscal 1834-35, to
�4,137,975 in 1850-51.(11) Meanwhile, the tax collections had been extended
to bear down upon the entire subcontinent.
In Bombay (where the family of John Foster and Allen Dulles made its fortune
in plunder with the East India Company), Governor Mountstuart Elphinstone
explained his land revenue policy:
The general principle is to take half of the money pro-
duced by the sale of the crops, and leave the rest to the
Ryot [peasant].... In the Ahmedabad [district], the num-
ber of villages that have been let to the highest bidder
[rented to "tax-farmers" or private collectors], the con-
sequent detection of all sources of revenue . . . have a
tendency to strain the revenue to the highest pitch . . . If
I were to decide on the present condition of the people in
this collectorship, I should pronounce it to be very much
depressed. The Ryots seem to be ill clothed and ill-lodged.(12)
The Bombay Administrative Report, published later in the century, was more
graphic:
>From the outset it was found impossible to collect anything approaching to
the full revenue. In some Districts not one-half could be realised.... Every
effort, lawful or unlawful, was made to get the most out of the wretched
peasantry, who were subjected to torture, in some instances cruel and
revolting beyond all description, if they would not or could not yield what
was demanded. Numbers abandoned their homes, and fled into the neighbouring
Native States. Large tracts of land were thrown out of cultivation, and in
some Districts no more than a third of the cultivable area remained in
occupation. (13)
Other reports tell of cultivators fleeing from the tax collectors into the
jungle, being rounded up by British solders and flogged and tortured to get
them back to work.(14) In the Bombay revenue district, tax collections
increased from �868,000 in 1817 to �1,818,000 in 1821.(15)
As the native Indian cotton disappeared from the market, with the devastation
of its cultivators, the British textile exporters could depend on a different
source of cheap raw material American slave cotton.
An important lesson from the British oligarchs' experience in India was the
maipulation of popular culture in support of the planned destruction of the
economy. The object of the Company's cultural warfare was to prevent at all
costs the importation of Western values and ideals into India. Later, the
conquerors of India would strive to eliminate Western values from the
American republic, while imposing "reforms" that would reverse American
economic and cultural achievements.
The Company simply adopted the most outrageously decadent aspects of
surviving Indian religious orthodoxy, patronized them, and through the
selection of religious leaders and laws, made British-run "Hinduism" and
"Islam" into the state religions for the Company's subjects.
This was no "visitors' acceptance of the ways of the host." Nothing of
positive value, that still remained from earlier Indian civilization�or from
substantial modernizing initiatives of recent Indian leaders�was selected by
the British to continue functioning. Reservoirs, canals, and sluices which
had irrigated much of ancient Asia, still continued to operate in parts of
southern India which the British had yet to conquer in the early 1800s.
But for the two centuries of British rule, the areas they controlled were
subjected to droughts and floods, leading to epidemics and famines, because
the British chose not to keep up the ancient Indian system of water
management.
No, other projects were more important.
Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal (1772-1774) and Governor General of India
(1774-1786), selected certain "Brahmin pandits from different parts of . . .
Bengal [who] were brought to Calcutta where they were employed for two years
in order to prepare a compendium of Hindu laws in Sanskrit.... The manuscript
was then translated into Persian and from Persian into English . . .
presented . . . to the Court of Directors of the East India Company and
published in 1776."(16) This Company creation became the Gentoo Code�the law
for Hindus.
Exactly the same process was followed for the Moslems: Hastings hired certain
amenable "learned professors of the Mahomedan Law," who translated material
from Arabic to Persian, establishing for India a compendium of law (for
Moslems only) called Hedaya. (17)
And who was to enforce this new "orthodoxy"? Of course, theologians would be
necessary.
The Company "took under their management a large number of Hindu temples.
They advanced money for rebuilding important shrines and for repairing
others, and paid the salaries of the temple officials, even down to the
courtesans, which were a normal feature of the great temples of the South.
They granted large sums of money for sacrifices and festivals and for the
feeding of Brahmans.... Even cruel and immoral rites, such as hook swinging,
practised in the worship of the gods, and the burning of widows, were carried
out under British supervision. In order to pay for all these things a pilgrim
tax was imposed...."(18)
Lord William Bentinck, Governor General from 1828 to 1835, "reformed" the law
to allow for prosecution of persons who "used violence" to recapture widows
who escaped from the funeral pyre where they were supposed to be burned with
their husbands' bodies.(19)
If widows escaped this slaughter, they were not allowed to remarry�an
especially cruel law because 1) from one-third to one-half of Indian women
were married before the age of ten; and 2) powerful Brahmins were allowed to
marry ten or hundreds of wives, whom they visited in rounds. The British
outlawed child marriage in 1929, and the Republic of India outlawed polygamy
in 1955.
Meanwhile, under British control, new tribes were brought under Hindu law and
converted to Hinduism;(20) at the same time, the Company successfully
prevented Christian missionaries from entering India until well into the
nineteenth century.
To administer this horror and carnage, the British East India Company felt
the need for a new species of employee, trained in a new type of "economics,"
who by his training could be relied upon to commit murder on an unprecedented
scale without pity and without remorse. This kind of training would have to
involve the selection of candidates with criminal propensities, and
inculcation with the most degraded concepts of racialism and irrationalism.
To this end the Company founded two colleges in England. Its military school
at Addiscombe trained 3,600 for India between 1809 and 1861. One of its most
illustrious graduates was Field Marshal Baron Robert Napier of Magdala, whose
family would later use the proceeds of his shocking crimes to "reform"
American laws and finances.
The theoretical justifications for the Asian adventures were developed at the
Company's Hailybury College near Hertford. It was here that the East India
Company's professor of economics and modern history, Thomas R. Malthus, wrote
and published most of his infamous works on the necessity for population
reduction, and the inevitablility of poverty and suffering, during his tenure
from 1806 to 1834.
The headquarters for the Company was the East India House in London. James
Mill (1773-1836), economist and disciple of radical hedonist spymaster Jeremy
Bentham, was Examiner of Correspondence for the Company for 18 years. His
son, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), rose after 34 years with the Company to
the same position as his father. He was a key policy-making official of the
Company, and was the central organizer of the Radical Party which planned the
policies of Great Britain (and, they hoped, the United States) in the
nineteenth century.
In 1857, the people of India rose in rebellion against the Company's rule.
The slaughter and torture imposed on the "mutineers" by the Company's troops
rank with the vilest of all acts in human history. Drunken, insane soldiers
looted, raped, maimed, murdered, and burned their way across India.
The world was outraged. Queen Victoria took the administration of India away
from the East India Company, which was dissolved several years later. John
Stuart Mill wrote the Company's final, futile plea to the Parliament that the
Company be allowed to keep India, on the grounds that its administration had
cost the government nothing, that "private enterprise" would keep India's
affairs out of party politics!(21)
John Stuart Mill became the leading spokesman for Classical Economics, or
"free enterprise" theory. As the chief intelligence officer for the greatest
single criminal organization on earth, which had succeeded in "freeing" India
from nearly all traces of economic enterprise, Mill now turned in the final
years of his life to apply the lessons of India to the conquest of America.
--cont--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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