On 3/30/07, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Sean Andrews writes of me, apropos the Narmada Dam:
>
> "His position reminds me very much of Hayek's "
>
> Which is a bit daft, because Hayek's position is that the rights of private
> property take precedence over government action, which would favour the
> subsistence farmers over the relocation programme.
I think the way I meant that was pretty clear to anyone who bothered to read the whole paragraph beyond it. Why all the sudden you seem to be taking a diametrically opposed view than you did two days ago, but you're pretending to be saying the same thing, is beyond me.
> All in all I think Sean uses words differently from me. He calls me
> reactionary,
I called you reactionary because you seem to think that anyone involved in environmental activism (especially those funded from the west) is somehow worse than the WB, the Indian Government, or any other number of actors. having this as a default position--that any environmental activists are automatically more suspect than any other actors involved in a situation--is indeed a reactionary position, usually taken by batty people who work part time for Exxon/Mobil or who share an office with folks who think we should trade futures on how many people will die b/c of Avian flu. I am not taking any side in this particular argument. I'm simply attacking yours. However, since you seem to change the specifics of it every few posts, I can see how you might get confused.
when he sides with the World Bank and some US-based
> missionaries against an Indian government-backed development programme, for
> irrigation and hydro-electric power.
>
So now I'm championing the WB? Oh this is rich. Tell me more.
> He cites many unnamed "independent" sources who question the dam's structure
> and finances, but all of these were available to the Madhya Pradesh and
> Gujarat governments as they were to the Indian Supreme Court before they
> made their decision to go ahead. Now of course, Sean, the World Bank,
> Patrick and the NBA might be right, but if they are they have failed to make
> their case where they should, in the state assemblies and legal system of
> India.
I have never said I had a position one way or the other. I just said you had a position but you were failing to disclose it all along. The independent sources I spoke about are listed in the World Bank report I forwarded. And, at the time, since you were blaming the NBA for ruining such a perfectly good project and convincing the World Bank to pull out of the project (i.e. back when villifying the group Roy was involved with was the purpose of the day) I thought it somewhat significant that the WB had its own problems with the project, based on several other independent reviews. If the new argument is about the absolute soveriegnty of the state, I'll try to adjust accordingly--but not now, this is getting quite exhausting.
Incidentally, I am really pleased to hear that you find India's democratic structures to be so responsive to people's needs--particularlythe needs of citizens who are getting in the way of capital improvement projects and the like. I certainly don't have the same experience living in the US, but perhaps they have a more robust form of democracy in India.
> Sean is sarcastic about my "innate ability to smell a rat which
> the rest of us simply don't possess". Well, it is true that the left used to
> be a lot more alert to the pitfalls of romantic anti-capitalism (see Lenin's
> Economic Romanticism, or the passages on Feudal Socialism in the Communist
> Manifesto). But I don't think it takes a genius to work out that a
> Washington-based charity and the World Bank are not the most obvious
> champions of India's people.
Ok so a few days ago, you didn't know why the World Bank pulled the funding--the insinuation being that they shouldn't have as it was a perfectly good project. Then two days ago you blamed the NBA for convincing the World Bank to illegitimately pull funding. Now the World Bank is evil again (which would have been my starting point and, I think, the NBA's) but it is the NBA itself which is in cahoots with the World Bank to destroy something the Indian Government really wanted to do (again, the people who protested on the ground
As for your raeding of Lenin, I'm quite familiar with these positions (even read a good portion of Desai's Marx's Revenge to help me learn how close Marx really was to Hayek and how much both woulf have loved "globalization.") Unfortunately, I am not a genius so in the future if you could bring me up to speed with your own changing position on the issue at hand, it would really help me out.
then again, something tells me you aren't all that aware of what you've already said. Just so long as the "Washington Based charity" (because it has some interest in the environment) gets the brunt of the blame in the final articulation of your argument, you seem pretty comfortable with taking whatever position makes them look most culpable and evil. I'm not all that interested in making them look good, just in saying that there seems to be some complicating factors (i.e. people who live in this area, the fact that more than one group was involved) that might require some modification of your own position, or at the very least some more understanding of people who took a different one. It's sort of a "just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you" kind of thing. Just because there was a "washington based charity" (with, incidentally, many Indian citizen members and leaders--and this was one group among many) involved, doesn't mean that Roy (and many others) weren't justified in trying to help the people who would be displaced and raising awareness about the effects of projects like this. Anyway, not holding my breath on any of this and apologies to the list for continuing this played-out thread one post more.
s