Three cheers for the heroic academic, an authoritative voice of integrity in a chaotic and unreliable world. The heroic academic may be out of fashion, but those of us who work at universities hear a lot about “integrity” these days, and some of us actually believe in it. We want our universities to be beacons of incorruptibility, trusted and trustworthy. Many of us believe that the whole point of the “ivory tower” is to insulate us from the pressures that people face — both in the private sector and in government — to compromise with the devil. We have academic freedom so that we can fearlessly tell the truth, not so that we can lie without consequences.

That’s why it’s so depressing when our universities seem to act in ways that deceive the public, seemingly using their insider knowledge to trick people into false understandings. It bothers me so much that I’ve made it a kind of personal mission to call attention to what I consider to be false narratives regarding Australian universities. In fact, I recently submitted a trio of “back to school” op-eds to three major newspapers (the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian). Each one exposed what I considered might constitute inappropriate behavior on the part of the universities’ trade association, Universities Australia (UA). All three were rejected, and it is my belief that someone may have put pressure on editors not to publish at least one of these articles (and perhaps all three).

Thankfully, all three were accepted by MacroBusiness, an Australian website dedicated to publishing “fact-checked, data-driven analysis and opinion.” What’s more, MacroBusiness offered to publish them outside the paywall, without my even asking. But just like the big newspapers, MacroBusiness is a business, and it relies on subscriptions to stay in business. I hope you will consider supporting the site. It really is an important resource for Australia and Australians.

My first back-to-school piece focused on UA’s pre-budget submission to the Treasury, asking (of course) for more money for the university system. Now, I work at a university, and I am all in favor of increased public support for public universities — especially my own. But I am firmly committed to telling the truth while asking for it. That’s why I get so upset when I see what I believe may be “self-serving errors” in the university system’s pleas for more government funding:

MacroBusiness | University financial claims are full of self-serving errors

As I characterize their behavior in these terms, I note that Australia has draconian defamation laws that preclude the kind of colorful language that is often used in the United States.

For an example of a self-serving error, consider the opening bullet point in UA’s budget claim: “educating 1.5 million Australians every year, universities are the engine room training the nurses, teachers, construction managers, engineers and tech workers our economy depends on.”

While it might have been nice for UA to admit that humanities and social sciences students are important too, that’s not the problem. The problem is that Australia’s universities do not educate “1.5 million Australians.” They educate 1.5 million people, of whom roughly 1 million are Australian and 500,000 are foreigners. That’s right: roughly one-third of all of our students are international. And UA must know this; in fact, the data are available on their own website.

OK, errors can creep into even the most carefully edited document. So what about UA’s third bullet point, that international education is a “$52 billion export engine” for Australia? That is also incorrect. And it’s also been a major topic of controversy, so thoroughly debunked that the Australian Bureau of Statistics was forced to issue a clarification on the number. If UA is not aware that the $52 billion figure is wrong, it should be.

The problem is that $52 billion represents the total spending of international students in Australia, without taking into account amounts that they actually earn onshore while studying. Since the overwhelming majority of international students work while they are here, a large portion of their spending is generated onshore, and thus does not represent “export” earnings. Everyone knows this; experts have been pointing it out for at least a decade. So why repeat a number that is known to be incorrect?

In both of these cases (and others cited in my article), UA has chosen to put forward a claim that presents the universities in a positive light, despite the fact that UA either knows or should know that the claim is incorrect. I can’t present my full opinion on this matter because I can’t afford a lawsuit. So you be the judge.

My second piece really was a back-to-school piece: back to school for us, and back to Canberra for UA and its member universities:

MacroBusiness | It’s back to Canberra for education bureaucrats

Every year around this time UA hosts its “Solutions Summit” in the nation’s capital, an event that “brings together more than 1,000 leaders from universities, government, business and the community to shape the policy and partnerships that will guide the year ahead.”

It is a law of nature that the good and the great should meet regularly at networking conclaves, and no one would deny senior university administrators their annual shindig. But an event of this kind is also an opportunity to prod universities to fix some of the perennial problems that plague the sector as a whole. One among several problems featured in my article is the lack of English fluency shown by many of our international students. Simply put, many students, even at the most prestigious universities, can’t communicate in English.

But the Australian government has recently lifted the minimum English test scores required for student visas. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. Universities don’t actually mind the government requiring higher English scores, because most of the universities run side-businesses teaching English. The higher the entry score for university study, the more international students have to sign up for these “foundation” courses before commencing university study. That wouldn’t be a problem … except that students who complete foundation courses don’t have to re-take an international English test. It’s enough just to pass the course.

And nearly everyone passes; the promotional materials assure students of that.

Obviously, if these courses really taught students up to a university standard in English, the universities would be happy to have their students prove it with an international English test. And if the government really wanted to ensure that all of our international students were really able to communicate in English, they’d simply make all of them take the test. So why are literally hundreds of thousands of international students allowed to study at Australian universities without having to independently certify their English skills on an international test? Once again, I’ll let you reach your own conclusions.

To be honest, I wrote my third piece just for fun. I read that UA’s chief executive was complaining about government over-regulation that was costing our universities hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs. Now, if you work at a university, you know that administrators have never seen a regulation they don’t like. The kinds of people who go into university administration are generally the kinds of people who revel in regulation: the three pillars of this, the four dimensions of that, the eight principles of no-one-remembers-what, are all included on mandatory reports, collected and collated across the sector.

No regulation or reporting mechanism is more noble than a virtue-signaling one. Disabilities, racism, sexual harassment, you name it, if there’s a group to be protected, university administrators will spare no expense in protecting it — or at least, in loudly and visibly proclaiming their commitment to protecting it. And thus I simply couldn’t resist pointing out some specific examples of the irony of UA complaining about the high burden of regulatory reporting:

MacroBusiness | Over-regulation is the price of virtue signaling

Take for example Australia’s new Higher Education Gender-Based Violence Regulator. The need for this new regulator was (supposedly) demonstrated by UA’s National Student Safety Surveys (more on them another time), UA provided technical support for the legislation that created the new regulator, and the legislation was commended and welcomed by UA.

This, despite that fact that the government estimates that it will cost the universities $173.2 million a year to collect the relevant data and administer the required campus bureaucracies to support this new regulatory behemoth.

The universities never tire of virtue signaling about inclusion. On whether or not they really mean it, you’ll no doubt have your own opinion. Either way, complaining about the costs of complying with regulations that they themselves have demanded is simply ludicrous. But don’t worry. The government agreed with UA to set up a “better regulation” working group composed of “regulators, university peak bodies, unions and student representatives” to make recommendations for reducing regulation and cutting red tape. Good luck.

MacroBusiness describes its mission as bridging “the gulf between the Australian business media and reality.” It’s not only the business media that often shows a gap with reality; it really is a media-wide challenge. Admittedly, we all tend to think that we’re right and the others are wrong, but sometimes that the gaps between what the media claims to be real and what actually is real are clearly demonstrable. And not just the media.

The MacroBusiness mission statement goes on to explain:

That this gap exists without the heavy-hand of a dictator is testament to the power of vested interests, monopolies, weak government, closed ideologies and a perennial culture of populism.

In effect, it means our leadership class can make unaccountable economic and business blunders while being measured against inappropriate yardsticks.

At MacroBusiness we measure our economy and our elite against the lessons of history, reason and ideas to provide a better discussion for your investments and business.

That’s a sentiment with which I can agree. I don’t know that they always get things right, but I’m glad that they’re trying, and I believe that they sincerely are trying. That’s really what integrity is all about: sincerely trying. People of integrity make mistakes. They get things wrong. But they don’t intentionally deceive, and I’ve never had the feeling while reading MacroBusiness that anyone was trying to deceive me. I’m proud to see my work published by MacroBusiness, and if you’re Australian, I hope you will check out the site.

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International Student Course-Hopping: University Complicity and Government Inaction

One popular strategy is for students to enrol at public universities (which have high visa acceptance rates), commence study onshore, then immediately drop out. There are 11 public universities in Australia where dropout rates exceed 30% for commencing (first-year) international undergraduate students. Central Queensland University tops the list at 57.2%.

But the non-genuine students who drop out don’t just leave. They transition onto bridging visas while they apply for admission to lower-cost cooking and hospitality programs, a practice called “course-hopping.” The median waiting time for immigration approval for new courses is 28 weeks, during which students retain full work rights. Unsuccessful applicants can appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), where the 42,098 pending “course-hopping” cases constitute more than one-third of the ART’s total caseload. The median waiting time for an ART decision is another 64 weeks, again with full work rights.

This is all legal. But it only happens because Australia gives essentially unlimited work rights to international students. During the teaching semester, international student hours are technically limited, but those limits are not enforced. When a student drop-out is on a bridging visa, there are no limits at all. From the non-genuine student’s point of view, the long waits on bridging visas are not a deterrent. They are a desirable feature of the system.

The net result is that even non-genuine international students whose course-hopping applications are refused can generally obtain the right to work in Australia for more than two years for less than $25,000 in total tuition and fees — consisting of one semester’s tuition, health insurance, and a series of application and filing fees. As of mid-2025, there were an extraordinary 107,274 erstwhile students in Australia on bridging visas, up from 13,034 in 2023. That’s more than one-tenth of the entire international student cohort.

But the process doesn’t end there. Even if the ART denies an onshore visa renewal, non-genuine students can apply for asylum in Australia. When these applications are denied (as they almost always are), the denials can be appealed back to the ART. Success rates appear to be very low, but once again the wait times can extend a non-genuine student’s right to work in Australia by several additional years.

Many outer-metropolitan and regional universities have taken advantage of the non-genuine demand for student visas by opening low-cost Sydney city campuses. Roughly half of these campuses are actually operated under contract by for-profit companies. By offering Sydney campuses, regional universities can profit from the strategic behaviour of non-genuine international students, many of whom never engage meaningfully with the courses they enrol in, while funneling these students directly to their preferred work location: Sydney.

As with so many other aspects of Australia’s temporary migration system, it’s all a rort. It’s a profitable rort for universities — and for the companies that exploit this large pool of insecure, unskilled labor. For the hard-working temporary immigrants from India and Nepal who make up the majority of this labor pool, it’s a risky bet on making enough money in Australia to justify the up-front costs of immigration. For those who end up sick, injured, or just plain unemployed, it can lead to financial ruin for their families, and potentially worse. There’s no social safety net for these highly vulnerable workers.

In my MRC paper, I recommend a simple solution for ending the non-genuine student abuse of the immigration system: require students who drop out of their initial programs to return home and reapply from offshore for any future study. This policy would be easy to implement and automatic in its operation. It’s an easy win for any government willing to take it.

International study should not be a low-cost labor program. If Australia wants access to a large pool of immigrant labor to staff its convenience stores, deliver its food, and keep wages down, it should put in place a formal guest worker program. Personally, I’d rather live in a high-wage country that relies on mechanization and self-service to meet its needs. But I’m not Australian. This report gives Australians the data they need to make informed decisions about their own country’s immigration programs — and to pressure their government for policy action.

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Interestingly, despite having Sanskrit (or Sanskritized) names, all three of these organizations—the RSS, the BJP, and the VHP—are known by their initials in the Latin alphabet. This practice reflects a pragmatism and flexibility that belies Western impressions that these organizations are somehow primitive and backward-looking. The RSS and the Sangh Parivar it leads are often characterized as traditional or ultraorthodox; they are in fact modern agents of change in Indian (and in the case of the VHP, global Hindu) society. The reforms they pursue may not be the reforms that secular Western reformers would prefer, but they represent a break with tradition all the same. In the language of multiple modernities, they represent the Indian (and more specifically: Hindu) face of global modernization.

From its founding 100 years ago, the RSS has viewed itself as “a movement for national reconstruction.” It is what social scientists call a “national rejuvenation movement,” akin to Friedrich Jahn’s Turnverein, Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy, and Sun Yat Sen’s Kuomintang. Although the RSS is primarily a nationalist organization, it is nonetheless a thoroughly Hindu organization. Non-Hindus are allowed to join, but few do. In the Indian diaspora, the RSS eschews any pretense of ecumenicalism, branding its overseas affiliates as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS). The organization is probably best understood as a nationalist organization in a Hindu society, rather than as a “Hindu nationalist” organization. That is to say, the organization seeks to rebuild India on Hindu principles. It does not seek to expel or place legal impediments on non-Hindus.

The RSS certainly is not a “paramilitary” organization as Wikipedia, the US Library of Congress, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) would have readers believe. Members of the RSS do not train with or carry firearms, the organization has never been accused of stockpiling weapons, and the organization has never engaged in terrorism or insurrection. Historically, men meeting at RSS events have dressed in khaki shorts (later trousers) and white shirts, but that is hardly a uniform. Members of the RSS have engaged in martial arts exercises with wooden sticks (”lathis”), but not in tactical military training with practical weapons. The RSS is no more a paramilitary organization than the Boy Scouts, and much less of one than the Salvation Army.

Nor did the second head of the RSS, the lawyer and sometimes Hindu monk M.S. Golwalkar, ever say that “minorities such as Muslims were a threat to India and the country could learn from the Nazis’ killing of Jews.” The ABC repeated this slander in a 2024 documentary on the RSS, refusing to back away from it even when community members raised objections. Efforts to link the RSS to Nazism are propagated through anti-BJP activist networks with no ultimate basis in reality. Just as one could identify dozens (if not hundreds) of claims made in supposedly reputable media outlets and academic journals that Donald Trump is a Nazi, a lazy journalist can find sources to cite claiming that the RSS, the BJP, and even Narendra Modi are Nazis. An honest journalist would go beyond the claims to look for the reality.

All claims of a connection between the RSS and Nazis ultimately trace back to a single paragraph in a 1939 book by M.S. Golwalkar called We, or Our Nation Defined. The authorship of the book is disputed (there are claims that it was only translated by Golwalkar, not written by him), but this is beside the point. The full, unfortunate passage reads:

German race pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic Races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how wellnigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.

This was written in 1939, at a time when the Nazi regime’s violent antisemitism had been publicized in the West, but well before the Holocaust. And to put this in context, it was the writing of an Indian living in a secondary city in British India, a 33-year-old who had never traveled outside India and did not use English in daily communication, at a time when Nazi Germany was widely admired by many otherwise respectable, well-informed, and well-traveled people in Western Europe and the United States. For comparison, a young John F. Kennedy wrote in 1945 (after the end of the war and with full knowledge of the Nazi death camps) that “in a few years, Hitler will emerge from the hate that now surrounds him and come to be regarded as one of the most significant figures ever to have lived.”

The Kennedy comparison is not meant to excuse what Golwalkar wrote, but to contextualize it. No serious media organization would write that Kennedy was a Nazi on the “gotcha” basis of a single poorly framed sentence—and Kennedy was a highly sophisticated, Harvard-educated native English speaker. Read Golwalkar’s book in full, and it becomes clear that he admired the Jewish people, and thought that they would successfully build a home in Palestine (a sentiment that might now attract opprobrium from other quarters). Reading the book, it also becomes clear that Golwalkar had only a hazy understanding of the European situation. For example, he incorrectly believed that Germany was a Catholic country with a president who had to take a “purely religious” oath of office.

We, or Our Nation Defined was a product of its time, and in any case it has long been disavowed by the RSS. The book was written at a time when Britain and France had just endorsed Hitler’s version of German nationhood by acceding to the division of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement, and was mainly motivated by the desire to avoid a similar division of India. It was the British, of course, who would in fact divide India on religious lines just a few years later. Twenty-first century Western sensibilities may be offended by the idea that minority communities cannot live peacefully in multicultural societies, but anyone who condemns Golwalkar for fearing the partition of India on religious lines must even more condemn postwar Britain’s Labour government for ... partitioning India on religious lines.

The final lie about the RSS that has been repeated so often that it has gained the patina of truth is that the RSS was somehow complicit in the 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gahdhi. It was not. It is true that Gahdhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, had occasionally attended RSS meetings. He held no position in the RSS, was not an RSS pracharak, did not obtain his gun from the RSS, and was not supported by the RSS after the crime. To hold the RSS responsible for Gandhi’s assassination would be equivalent to holding the Episcopal Church responsible for Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on the grounds that John Wilkes Booth attended its services. Decades of anti-RSS research have never established any meaningful connection between Godse and the organization.

When the RSS was founded 100 years ago, the United States was a segregated country, women in the United Kingdom still did not have full voting rights, and most European countries were ruled by authoritarian dictatorships. The past really is another country, and tenuous allegations of historical RSS misconduct must be seen in that light. Anyone who would condemn Golwalkar for his unsavory remarks must contend with the fact that Mahatma Gandhi once said that black South Africans were “troublesome, very dirty and live like animals,” and wrote approvingly of “the purity of races” practiced by white Afrikaners. Like any supposed RSS admiration for (prewar) Nazi Germany, these sentiments are terrible mistakes, long repudiated. The RSS was and is no more a racist organization than Gandhi’s Indian National Congress.

As the RSS celebrates its centenary, it can take pride in its history of overcoming systematic vilification and occasional official persecution to become India’s most important civil society organization. It has risen from humble origins to take center stage in India’s national life, and the political party it sponsors has governed India for the last 11 years. The RSS is increasingly flexing its ideological muscles as well, displacing India’s forlorn communists from their final bastion: the universities. That pressure is driving ever more shrill condemnations of this broadly conservative, but generally mainstream and egalitarian organization. Western journalists would do well not to be drawn into India’s internal ideological battles by taking academic criticism of the RSS at face value.

The RSS may not conform to Western prescriptions for politically correct thought, but Western intellectual colonialism has no purchase in twenty-first century India—nor in twenty-first century Bharat, the ancient and likely future name of the country. The RSS generally uses the term Bharat for India, symbolically preferencing the indigenous (and notably Hindu) name of the country over the foreign (English) one. Bharat is derived from a Sanskrit root meaning “to bear” (it is actually cognate with the English word), and apparently had the sense of bearing a responsibility or sustaining a sacred fire. In its own self-understanding, the RSS is steadfastly committed to bearing responsibility for the integrity of the Indian nation, and it does so by sustaining the flame of nationalism in India. Western observers will understand the RSS much better if they try to understand it on its own terms.

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Until 2015, productivity growth in Australia followed the business cycle, just like in every other country. Then from 2016-2019 net migration surged, and productivity stalled. When COVID hit, immigration collapsed—and productivity surged. Partly that was due to a sudden contraction in working hours, leading to rising productivity among those who remained in work. But productivity growth peaked at the end of the pandemic, not at its beginning.

Shorn of low-skill workers, the Australian economy experienced its best productivity growth of the last 20 years. This came to a screeching halt when the borders opened. Australia now has 1.8 million more workers than it did in mid-2019. That's an increase of 14% over pre-COVID levels, and nearly all of the increase has come from immigration.

Read my full analysis of the relationship between immigration and productivity growth in this weekend's Australian Financial Review. There you can find all detailed facts and figures on immigration and productivity to support the argument. My article is also available online (though paywalled) at:

• Financial Review | Australia’s Low-Skilled Migration Is Killing Productivity

It's a simple principle of economics that when you increase the supply of something, the price goes down and it gets used less efficiently. If you flood the market with oil, pump prices will fall and people will take more trips. Restrict the oil supply and pump prices will rise, encouraging people to use petrol more efficiently. The same is true of labour. If you expand the labour supply, real wages (adjusted for inflation) will stagnate, and productivity will decline as labour is used less efficiently. And that's exactly what has happened in Australia since COVID: massive immigration has depressed wage and productivity growth.

The facts are as obvious as the logic. Combining student visas (half of them for non-university study), post-graduate work visas, 3-year “working holiday” visas, and 3-year "work and holiday" visas, foreign youngsters now make up more than 10% of Australia's total labour force—and they're not working high-skill, high-productivity jobs. Anyone living in a capital city who has ever taken an Uber, ordered Uber Eats, visited a restaurant, hired a removalist, needed home care, or driven past a lollipop girl knows the truth: Australia has become a low-skill, low-wage, low-productivity economy, and it's all being driven by immigration.

Here in Australia, we don't like to think of ourselves as living in a guest worker economy. In places like Singapore and Dubai, citizens enjoy government-subsidized lifestyles while poor people from developing countries do all the tough work. So instead of bringing in low-wage guest workers, we sell study, graduate, and "working holiday" visas to poor people from developing countries, who do all the tough work. It's just as exploitative. But it feels better to think that the young people we're exploiting are earning valuable diplomas as they holiday in our restaurant kitchens and deliver our food.

Readers who are focused on the politics of immigration in the United States, be warned (and be informed): Australia is a different country. Among people aged 20-44 in Australia, an incredible 40% of the population is foreign-born. Considering that immigrants work at higher rates than the native born (and that it’s near-impossible difficult to get a visa if you are disabled or otherwise limited in your ability to work), it is likely that immigrants form roughly 50% of the labor force in the 20-44 age bracket.

The mandarins on Macquarie Street and in Canberra may not want to see it, but the reasons for stagnant productivity growth are staring us in the face every day. There are 1.5 million of them, and they're good, hard-working people. But productivity growth means increasing the use of technology, not increasing the amount of manual labour in the economy. Every economist knows that. They just don't want to tell you.

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Of course, we do have V-Dem, and now we do know. But few people know where V-Dem gets its data. They don’t come from independent, objective evaluations made by a team of European experts meeting in conclave in Sweden. They come primarily from surveys of India’s own political scientists, who are asked to evaluate highly subjective criteria like the independence of the electoral commission and secret government influence on the press. And India’s own political scientists have an axe to grind. It’s like asking Harvard and Yale democracy “experts” about the quality of American democracy under Donald Trump. You’ll get an answer, but you can’t be sure that the answer is objective.

For the full story behind V-Dem (and the development of Indian democracy itself), check out my book Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy. But for a one-hour summary, you can watch the recent launch of the book at Sydney’s Centre for Independent Studies:

• CIS | Dharma Democracy Book Launch

The CIS host, Tom Switzer, asked a series of tough questions drawn from recent press coverage of the challenges faced by Indian democracy. Listen to the end to hear my answers. And listen to the very end to hear the best question of all, from a member of the audience who was skeptical of my findings because they contradicted everything she heard from friends and family in India. What I told her was that systematic social science meant benchmarking India to countries that we all accept are democracies. Every democracy has problems. India’s problems are — at least to the extent that they can be quantified — fairly typical of the problems experienced by well-institutionalized democracies all around the world.

If you live in Sydney but you missed the CIS launch, come see me present the book’s findings on Sunday, August 10 in Wentworthville at the South Asian Film Arts & Literature Festival:

It’s only $15 for a whole day’s education, enlightenment, and fun. I’d love to see you there, and of course I’ll have books for sale. Sign up via the link at:

• SAFAL Fest | Literature Day & Book Fair

I’m really looking forward to the festival. If you’re an Australian of Indian origin, it’s the obvious place to be next weekend. If you’re an Australian who’s NOT of Indian origin, it will be a magnificent cultural experience. Many thanks to the irrepressible Ash Gholkar for the invitation, and to all of you for attending!

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In this country, those who speak English will soon feel ashamed — the creation of such a society is not far away. Only those who are determined can bring about change. I believe that the languages of our country are the jewels of our culture. Without our languages, we cease to be truly Indian.

You can listen to the relevant passage in Shah’s speech with an English translation at:

• YouTube | Amit Shah's comments on speaking English

Shah’s argument, in essence, was simple linguistic nationalism: that Indians should learn and treasure Indian languages. Not much to see there.

But a freelance journalist in Delhi saw her opportunity. Amrit Dhillon is a highly reputable veteran reporter who writes for a multitude of Western newspapers, ranging in politics from The Times (“Indian Paintings Reveal what Bewitched British Colonialists”) to The Guardian (“Transgender Sex Workers Teach India’s Truckers about Aids”). She is also an ardent opponent of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

So how do you spin an anti-BJP angle to the Murdoch-owned Times of London? You present Amit Shah as an anti-colonialist who hates India’s English heritage. Had it been the left-leaning Guardian, a different angle would have been necessary. But The Times took the bait, running with:

• The Times | Indians Should Be Ashamed to Speak English, Says Modi’s Minister

Of course, Narendra Modi had nothing to do with the speech, but no one in England has ever heard of Amit Shah, so “Modi’s Minister” would have to do.

The story was then picked up by columnist Helen Trinca of The Australian and run under a photo of Narendra Modi bearing the caption:

Since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, sidelining English as a ‘colonial relic’ and privileging Hindi has been part of the nationalist project.

• The Australian | English Language Now a ‘Shameful’ Colonial Relic in India

No source was given for the scare quote ‘colonial relic’, though it is the sort of thing that Modi would say. Of course, it is also true: English is a colonial relic in India. I would say exactly the same thing myself. In the article itself, Trinca disapprovingly noted that:

Amit Shah, a former president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, argued that India would “cease to be truly Indian” if the “languages of our country” were not supported.

One must wonder whether or not she believes that Australia would cease to be truly Australian if English were not supported in her own country. It is hard to imagine a columnist for The Australian feeling comfortable with a future government that allowed Australian public schools to teach the national curriculum in Hindi, Gujarati, and Mandarin instead of in English. But who knows? Maybe the Murdoch press will one day come to support multiculturalism after all.

Amrit Dhillon’s London Times article was also picked up by British journalist Jawad Iqbal, writing for The Spectator:

• The Spectator | India’s War on English Makes No Sense

• Spectator Australia | India’s War on English Makes No Sense

The Australian version of Iqbal’s article was also sent to me by a friend. In it, Iqbal characterizes Amit Shah’s “war on English” as “stupid and counterproductive.” He approvingly quotes India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress (INC) as saying that:

English is not shameful; it is empowering. English is not a chain; it is a tool to break the chains

Of course, there is no “war on English” in India. There is, however, an epic political battle being fought between an entrenched English-speaking elite (represented by the Gandhi family’s INC) and an insurgent new elite (represented by Modi’s BJP). Western media have been thoroughly weaponized by the old English-speaking elite to portray their less internationalized opponents in scathingly negative terms. And Western readers are left completely unaware that they are being intentionally manipulated into supporting one side over another in India’s political debates.

The great irony in this case is that the English-speaking INC intellectuals are India’s “left-wing” socialists and the insurgent BJP intellectuals are the “right-wing” conservatives in Indian politics. Australian and British socialists find little space for their views in outlets like The Times, The Australian, and The Spectator. But English-speaking Indian socialists are sufficiently sophisticated to know exactly what buttons to press when they want to get a conservative Westerner to condemn conservative Indians. They don’t pitch articles about Narendra Modi’s close ties to big business, or his market-oriented economic reforms to the Murdoch press. They pitch Modi’s Third World anti-colonialism.

Personally, I have no horse in this race. As far as I am concerned, Indians are welcome to speak English or Hindi. They can call their country India or Bharat. And they can embrace state socialism or freewheeling capitalism. It’s up to them. But I do know propaganda when I see it. And I saw a lot of it in researching my new book, Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy. As I wrote in Chapter 3 in discussing the new Indian nationalism:

For a full account of how India’s cultural wars have shaped the country’s politics, please consider buying the book from your favorite store or from Amazon at:

• Amazon US | Dharma Democracy

• Amazon UK | Dharma Democracy

• Amazon AUS | Dharma Democracy

Researching this book really was an incredibly rewarding (though often frustrating) experience. I spent five years cutting through all the obfuscation that surrounds Indian history — and even Indian statistics. I worked very hard to provide an objective account of Indian politics and India’s democratic institutions. Sad to say, I came across hardly anyone else in my research who made a similar effort. Nearly everyone who writes about India is either a propagandist — or an unwitting dupe of propagandists.

People often think I’m biased because I’m very upbeat on India, but I set out on this research project without any position on India at all. Whatever opinions I have now, I have as a result of spending five years with the data. It was an education, to say the least. I hope people will take a serious look at what I found.

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I’m thrilled to announce that my new book Dharma Democracy will be launched the evening of July 24 at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. Tickets are available now at:

• CIS | Dharma Democracy Book Launch

Of course, I’d love to see everyone there. I’m very proud of this book; it’s the culmination of five years of painstaking research on a topic that is often obfuscated by outdated generalizations and politicized scholarship. The short summary is that Indian democracy is what you get when you operate high-quality liberal democratic institutions in a deeply traditional, passionately religious country with a GDP per capita of only $2500 per year: you can’t expect Indian voters to vote like Australians or Americans.

The long version is … 308 pages of detailed factual investigation into India’s performance on international benchmarks, historical analysis of the robustness of Indian democracy from its origins through the 1975-1977 Emergency, and earnest advice on how India build a more inclusive nation where all of its citizens feel valued.

Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy is now available globally on Amazon and other online platforms:

• Amazon | Purchase Dharma Democracy

Thanks for checking it out, and if you’re in Sydney, please do consider attending the July 24 launch. It’s going to be a great evening.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

India led the postcolonial world into independence after World War Two, and it set the pattern for all other postcolonial countries to follow: independence meant democracy. Nearly every country that was born after 1945 wrote itself a democratic constitution and fashioned itself a democracy. But only one stayed a democracy, from the beginning right through to today. India.

India was the Third World’s first democracy (in time), and it remains the Third World’s first democracy (in quality). Readers of recent reports from the Varieties of Democracy Institute and other ratings organizations may not believe it, but on virtually every measurable quality Indian democracy is the peer of established First World democracies like those found in Europe, North America, and Australasia. And I have the data to back that up.

In my new book Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy I unpack the claims and counter-claims made about the quality of Indian democracy, going beyond the rankings to examine the underlying data. Many of the criticisms of Indian democracy are demonstrably wrong. Others are pure fabrications. Few stick, and those that do can be stuck to other democracies as well. Simply put, India’s democratic institutions would not be out of place in a Western country of twenty or thirty times its income per capita.

But although India’s democratic institutions resemble those of the West, India’s electorate differs dramatically from the electorates of Australasia, North America, and Western Europe. The kinds of questions that are put to a vote in a highly traditional, strongly religious, thoroughly patriotic country with a GDP per capita of around $2500 are very different from the kinds of questions to be decided in the developed West. In Dharma Democracy, I explain what this means to a Western audience. Indian readers, too — whose understandings of Indian democracy are based on subjective personal experience — might be surprised to learn how their country stacks up in an objective analysis.

But if there is one audience I most dearly hope to reach with Dharma Democracy, it is the Western-born children of the Indian diaspora. Many of them are caught between their patriotic parents and a Western intellectual establishment that tells them that India is now an “electoral autocracy” on a par with communist China. They can be forgiven for having doubts. This book will offer them an objective account of Indian democracy told through data and documents, not subjective opinion. If you are a diaspora parent, please consider buying Dharma Democracy for your bicultural child. And tell your children that if, after reading the book, they still have any questions … Professor Babones would love to hear from them.

Dharma Democracy is now available in paperback from Amazon at:

• https://www.amazon.com/dp/1923224735/

Over the next few weeks, the book will be rolled out on other platforms, and soon thereafter it will be released in Kindle and other e-book formats. As a teaser, I’ve included a short excerpt from the Preface below. I hope you enjoy it.

Yours,

Salvatore

Excerpt from the Preface of Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy

by Salvatore Babones

Indian democracy is the politics of superlatives. Everyone knows that India, with nearly a billion registered voters, is the world's largest democracy. Few realize that, with an income per capita of less than $3000 in 2024, it is also the world's poorest. Or at least: it is by far the world's poorest country to be able to boast of more than a few decades of competitive elections under the rule of law with routine transfer of power between competing parties. India has been a democracy of some kind ever since it became an independent country in 1947, and it has been unambiguously a liberal democracy since the end of the 21-month "Emergency" of 1975-1977. The only other non-Western country that comes close to matching India's record of free and fair elections is Japan, where democracy was imposed by American forces after 1945. To that extent that India is a democracy, its democracy is, by contrast, entirely home-grown.

That said, much of the Western political science profession now believes that India is not a democracy. The leading democracy rating organization, Sweden's Varieties of Democracy Institute, categorizes India as an "electoral autocracy."[ii] Princeton University's Ashoka Mody believes that Indian democracy began "unraveling" under its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, went into a "death spiral" in the 1970s under his daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma), and "veered into dangerous territory" in the 1980s and 1990s before the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, "mounted a merciless assault on democracy" after taking office in 2014.[iii] Christophe Jaffrelot of Sciences Po in Paris characterizes "Modi's India" as an "authoritarian vigilante state."[iv] The University of Sydney's Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane call India an "elective despotism," writing that "with power-sharing democracy on its knees, blindfolded, elections prove useful to its killers."[v] Oxford University's Maya Tudor asks "has India really departed the shores of democracy?" and answers with the one word: "yes."[vi]

For most of India's on-the-ground political commentators, things are not so dire. The Berkeley-educated Indian policy analyst Rahul Verma takes issue with the prevailing international consensus, arguing that "claims of Indian democracy's death are highly exaggerated" and labeling accusations like those cited above as "an injustice to India's journey as a democracy."[vii] India's most prominent liberal political journalist, Shekhar Gupta, asked that "all those who said India's democracy was dead and buried, over, that we were no-hopers under fascist rule, please sit down and drink Kool-Aid."[viii] He apparently did not understand the American idiom. India's most prominent journalistic critic of Narendra Modi, Rajdeep Sardesai, believes that "the 2024 elections must be seen as arguably the most unfair election in the history of Indian politics," but that nonetheless "the humble voter could hold powerful politicians to account."[ix] And India's most prominent opposition politician, Rahul Gandhi, quite sensibly said after the 2024 elections that:

The fight for democracy in India is an Indian fight. With all due respect, it has nothing to do with anybody else. It's our problem. And we'll take care of it. We will make sure that democracy is secure.[x]

The Gandhi family scion is correct: India's democracy has always been India's fight. The widespread myth that India inherited its democracy from England is belied by the fact that India is the only one of the United Kingdom's major colonial possessions became and remained a democracy. It is true India's representative institutions were modeled on the British parliamentary system. But so too were the constitutions of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, all of which emerged out of the British Empire in South Asia. Pakistan in particular inherited a British constitutional legacy that was nearly identical to that of India, along with the Indian Civil Service and the British Indian Army, both of which were split in two to form the modern state institutions of India and Pakistan. Yet within two years of independence, Pakistan became officially an Islamic republic. It experienced its first military coup in 1958. It didn't hold proper elections until 1970, and when it did, the country erupted into civil war.

If things have turned out differently in India, the credit must go to the leaders who shaped the country's understanding of itself as a unified political community. Highly literate political activists like Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, B.R. Ambedkar, V.D. Savarkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, V. K. Krishna Menon, and the "father of the nation" M.K. "Mahatma" Gandhi gave India a democracy literature even more impressive than that left by the American founding fathers 150 years earlier. Most Western countries, including even the United Kingdom, primarily derived their democratic principles from the United States. Not India. The revolutionary intellectuals of India's national liberation movement charted the way to a distinctively Indian political philosophy that, although informed by American and European precedents, drew much more extensively on India's own experiences. Call it "dharma democracy."

Dharma is one of those words that linguists like to say is untranslatable, but in reality there is a very close English equivalent that captures nearly all of its meanings: duty. The philosopher (and second President of India) Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan famously defined dharma simply as "right action." Thus sanatana (eternal) dharma encompasses the sacred responsibilities all people owe to God; yuga (era) dharma mandates adherence to the customs of the society in which one lives; sva (own) dharma dictates the expectations of a person's specific position in society. Each is a form of propriety, describing the forms of behavior that are appropriate to a specific context. A king's raja dharma as a ruler may come into conflict with his pitri dharma as a father if he believes that his son is not strong enough to succeed him: kingly duty demands that he ensure the future security of his people, while parental duty demands that he advance the career of his son. Dharma is an infinitely flexible term because it can be applied in an infinite number of situations, but ultimately it comes down to duty. As Radhakrishnan explained, "every form of life, every group of men has its dharma, which is the law of its being."[xi]

Independent India emerged as a democracy in 1947 because India's independence leaders shared an overwhelming sense of rashtra dharma: duty to the nation. This is not quite the same thing as rajya dharma (duty to the state). It is a commitment to the people of a country, as a people – what the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini called a "community of duty." Mazzini characterized the nation as "a common faith, a tradition distinct from that of other nations, and constituting the past, present, and future generations of our people an historical unity."[xii] This romantic ideal had a great influence on the leaders of India's national liberation movement, from Mahatma Gandhi on down. In fact, Gandhi included a chapter on "Italy and India" in his foundational work, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, originally published in 1909 and promptly banned by the British. It is precisely the chapter in which he first formulated the idea of non-violent resistance. Directly citing the example of Mazzini, Gandhi said that in order to achieve freedom, "what we need to do is to sacrifice ourselves."[xiii]

The literary works of India's independence leaders are suffused with the idea of duty to the nation, although it was not always clear just what "nation" people owed their duty to. Many thought that democracy meant duty to the whole world. The Indian nationalist Sri Aurobindo (again citing Mazzini) wrote in 1908 that "the weakness of European democracy and the source of its failure" was that "it took as its motive the rights of man and not the dharma of humanity."[xiv] Others were more clear that they held a duty specifically to the Indian nation. When the independence leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak departed for London in 1918 to press for Indian home rule, he described it as "a mission of dharma" on behalf of "the fortunes of the whole of India."[xv] Of course, the leaders of national liberation movements throughout the Third World professed duties toward the nations they aspired to lead. Mao Zedong even had "serve the people" inscribed over the entrance to the Communist Party compound in Tiananmen Square.

But India's independence leaders were of a different mold, and a different mind. With the possible exception of Nehru, they were more concerned to ensure the success of the independence struggle than that of their own careers. Gandhi may be the only "father" of a non-Western nation who clearly had no ambition to lead it. His dharma was to inspire, not to govern, and he seems to have recognized that. He and the other founders of India wrote extensively about their aspirations for the Indian nation, and fully expected to be held accountable by history for living up to their ideals. We don't have to tease implicit political philosophies out of their speeches and letters. India's founders left us a veritable library full of books laying out their visions for the future of their nation, and ruminating on the meaning of nationhood itself. The Indian independence literature is the world's most voluminous, and arguably its most thoroughly introspective. It is too little read by Indians today. It deserves to be read by the world.

In contrast to America's founding fathers, India's independence leaders went far beyond debating the simple mechanics of government. These minutiae do appear in their writings, and much ink (and some blood) was spilt over issues like reserved parliamentary seats for specific community groups, the degree to which the law should support social reform, and even the extent of the franchise. These were all important questions to be answered in the runup to independence, but the major literary works of India's founding fathers focused on what it meant to be a nation, who was and wasn't an Indian, the meaning of nationhood for India, and the duties of citizens toward the new Indian nation. India's constitution-making body, the Constituent Assembly that sat from late 1946 to early 1950, debated such matters as the national flag, the national emblem, the national anthem, the national song (not the same thing), the national language, and (especially) what the country should be named. Everyone agreed that India was an old nation, even if no one agreed just what nation it was.

Continue reading at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1923224735/

[ii] Multiple authors, 2024, Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot, Varieties of Democracy Institute, page 17.

[iii] Ashoka Mody, 2023, India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today, Stanford University Press, pages 233, 18, and 19.

[iv] Christophe Jaffrelot, 2021, Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, translated by Cynthia Schoch, Princeton University Press, pages 349 and 405.

[v] Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, 2021, To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism, Oxford University Press, pages 198-216 and 264.

[vi] Maya Tudor, 2023, "Why India's Democracy Is Dying," Journal of Democracy 34(3):121-132, page 122.

[vii] Rahul Verma, 2023, "The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy," Journal of Democracy 34(3):153-161, pages 153 and 159.

[viii] Shekhar Gupta, 2024, "Those Who Said Democracy Was Dead, Sit Down. Game's on in Indian Political League after a Frozen Decade," The Print, 4 June.

[ix] Rajdeep Sardesai, 2024, 2024: The Election That Surprised India, HarperCollins, pages xvii and 470.

[x] Rahul Gandhi, 2024, " Rahul Gandhi in the U.S. Targets Modi Government's Handling of China but Agrees with Its Approach on Pakistan," The Hindu, 11 September.

[xi] Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 1927, The Hindu View of Life, Unwin Books, page 56.

[xii] Giuseppe Mazzini, 1890 [1861], The Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini, Volume 1, Smith, Elder, & Company, pages 289 and 288.

[xiii] M.K. Gandhi, 1938 [1909], Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, Revised New Edition, Navajivan Press, page 101.

[xiv] Sri Aurobindo Ghose, 1908, "Asiatic Democracy," Bande Mataram, 16 March (pages 929-932 in The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Volumes 6 and 7, 2002, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, page 930).

[xv] Bal Gangadhar Tilak, 1919 [1918], Bal Gangadhar Tilak: His Writings and Speeches, Ganesh & Co., page 324.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

Dharma is the basis of democracy which Asia must recognize, for in this lies the distinction between the soul of Asia and the soul of Europe. – Sri Aurobindo Ghose

After five years of painstaking research (and I really do mean that), my big “India” book Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy will be published next month by Connor Court. Preorders are now open at:

• Connor Court | Dharma Democracy

I’m very proud of this book. It is the only book on the market that drills down from India’s headline democracy rankings to uncover what they mean on an indicator-by-indicator basis. The book also includes a thorough reevaluation of the birth of Indian democracy in 1947 and the reasons for its survival until today. And it addresses head-on the role of Muslim Indians in the social construction of the Indian nation.

Another distinctive feature of the book is its coverage of recent Indian books on Indian nationhood — books that are rarely read and almost never reviewed outside India.

If you’re in Australia, please do consider preordering now. If you’re in the United States or the United Kingdom, the book will be available on Amazon and other global book sites in May. And if you’re in India, look for a local Indian edition in December.

For a taste of what to expect, there’s a 1000 word excerpt below comparing freedom of expression in India under the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951 (when India was ranked 32nd in the world) and under Narendra Modi in 2023 (when India ranked 138th, just below Kazakhstan). This captures the empirical flavor of the book, which is grounded in cross-national and inter-temporal comparisons.

For those who would prefer something a little more literary, don’t worry: the later chapters include deep dives into the writings of Swami Vivekananda and the message of the Bhagavad Gita! For history fans, there’s a close telling of the culminating crisis of India’s independence struggle. And in the middle there’s a crucial chapter in which I offer my own analysis of why democracy succeeded in India when it failed in nearly every other postcolonial state.

Enjoy the excerpt, and please do consider preordering the book!

Excerpt on the evaluation of “Freedom of Expression” in India conducted by the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)

The V-Dem methodology is not kind to India. According to V-Dem's flagship Electoral Democracy Index, Indian democracy reached its zenith in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period of political instability and weak coalition governments. At its highest point, in 1998, Indian democracy was ranked only forty-fifth in the world. By the time Narendra Modi took office in 2014, India had fallen twenty-five places to number 71. Over the next nine years, India fell another thirty-nine places to number 110. Over the full quarter-century of decline, India's scores on V-Dem's two objective component indices (universal suffrage and elected leaders) remained exactly the same. India fell 52 places on the quality of its elections and 45 places on freedom of association, both serious drops. But the catastrophic decline that put India over the edge from "democracy" to "autocracy" was a 97 place fall in its global ranking for freedom of expression.

The conclusion (repeatedly emphasized by V-Dem over multiple reports) that India and China merely represent different varieties of autocracy – one an "electoral autocracy" and the other a "closed autocracy" – can mainly be attributed to this one component of democracy.[i] At number 138 in the world, India's freedom of expression is ranked sixteen places below Pakistan's and exactly halfway between Palestine's West Bank and Gaza. It is ranked far below Brazil (number 36), where freedom of online speech has come under serious threat and mainstream publishers have faced arbitrary enforcement and potentially gratuitous prosecutions.[ii] Similar accusations have been leveled at India, but India's online publishing takedown orders have been more narrowly focused, and its prosecutions of journalists have mainly targeted non-traditional news outlets.[iii] Another big difference is that Brazil's restrictions have come overwhelmingly from the political left, while India's have come from the right.

At issue is not whether or not it is proper for democracies to censor – clearly, more censorship means less freedom of speech, and by implication less democracy – but the degree of additional censorship that is required to justify a difference in the rankings of 102 places. The censorship allegations made against India and Brazil seem to be broadly similar, and a close observer of both countries might be puzzled by the huge gap in their freedom of expression scores. Whether both countries belong in the 30s or the 130s (or somewhere in between), it seems like their scores should fall into the same range. Similarly, it is reasonable to compare evaluations of freedom of expression in India over multiple decades. India's 2023 V-Dem score for freedom of expression is only marginally higher than during Indira Gandhi's Emergency (1975-1977), and much lower than the scores given for the Nehru years (1950-1964). This seem indefensible.

The Emergency speaks for itself. But the Nehru years are much less well-known. One of Nehru's first act as prime minister was to amend the constitution to restrict freedom of speech. He did this in 1951, before independent India had even held its first elections, ensuring that he went into those elections with the new restrictions already in place. The First Amendment to the Indian Constitution (1951) included a "statement of objects and reasons" in which Nehru frankly admitted that:

During the last fifteen months of the working of the Constitution, certain difficulties have been brought to light by judicial decisions and pronouncements specially in regard to the chapter on fundamental rights. The citizen's right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by article 19(1)(a) [the personal freedoms clause] has been held by some courts to be so comprehensive as not to render a person culpable even if he advocates murder and other crimes of violence. In other countries with written constitutions, freedom of speech and of the press is not regarded as debarring the State from punishing or preventing abuse of this freedom.[iv]

Nehru's First Amendment permitted the government to impose "reasonable restrictions" on personal freedoms (including freedom of speech and expression) "in the interests of the security of the State." It was fiercely resisted by the press at the time, with journalists staging nationwide protests.[v] The Times of India editorialized that "Mr. Nehru, once the spirited advocate of civil liberties in India, is now presiding over their obsequies."[vi] The Washington Post editorialized that the First Amendment would usher in "dictatorship in the strictest, most literal, sense of the word."[vii] The New York Times called the ensuing Press (Objectionable Matters) Act of 1951 "a repressive code as stringent as any that ever existed under the British."[viii] Under the act, journalists were treated like a "criminal tribe" who "lived in a state of 'perpetual terror'," according to period accounts.[ix]

Yet Nehru's India under the 1951 Press Act, like Brazil today, gets top marks from V-Dem's expert coders for freedom of expression. This final V-Dem component index is based on nine indicators, all of them highly subjective. Is press censorship "limited" or "routine"? Is media self-censorship "common" or does it occur only "on a few highly sensitive political issues"? Does the media "cover all newsworthy parties" equally at election time? Is it possible to code the extent to which people "are able to openly discuss political issues in private homes"?[x] These are the kinds of questions that must be answered by V-Dem's country experts, whose answers are aggregated via a statistical model to create its freedom of expression component index. This is, perhaps, a challenge that must be faced, but it is not a process on which a high degree of confidence can be placed. Wherever possible, objective indicators should be used to validate these subjective expert evaluations.

[i] Multiple authors, 2024, Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot, Varieties of Democracy Institute, page 13.

[ii] Christopher Hernandez-Roy and Michael McKenna, 2023, "Brazil's Misaligned Censorship Policy Risks Cutting Off Free Speech to Spite Disinformation," Center for Strategic and International Studies, 25 May; Murillo Camarotto, 2024, "Under Attack from So Many Quarters, Press Freedom in Brazil Is Now Threatened by Some Judges Too," Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 9 April.

[iii] Karishma Mehrotra and Joseph Menn, 2023, "How India Tamed Twitter and Set a Global Standard for Online Censorship," Washington Post, 8 November; unsigned, 2023, "16 Indian Journalists Have Been Charged Under UAPA, 7 Are Currently Behind Bars," The Wire, 6 October.

[iv] The Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951.

[v] Unsigned, 1951, "Freedom of the Press," Times of India, 21 May.

[vi] Unsigned, 1951, "Freedom of the Press," Times of India, 23 June.

[vii] Unsigned, 1951, "Talking Too Much," Washington Post, 28 June.

[viii] Unsigned, 1951, "India's Press Law," New York Times, 8 October.

[ix] Unsigned, 1954, "Journalists Treated Like 'Criminal Tribes," Times of India, 11 March.

[x] Multiple authors, 2024, V-Dem Codebook V14, Varieties of Democracy Institute, pages 207, 210, and 188-189.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

But Musk is a crazy Bond villain archetype. He may change the world, but he will never shape it. Don’t get me wrong; he’s a lot of fun. But he is a revolutionary, not a leader. Sensible, mainstream, powerful people will not follow him down his many rabbit holes.

Enter Mark Zuckerberg. He was once a visionary. Now he’s a businessman. On Tuesday he announced that he would be ending censorship on Facebook. Not only that; he announced that he would be working with Trump (and by implication, with Musk) to overturn censorship efforts worldwide:

Watch the video. This is the most important announcement of the Trump II era (which, like it or not, has already begun). Zuckerberg admits that Facebook previously suppressed free expression. He admits that his own fact checkers have been “politically biased.” He admits that “mistakes account for the vast majority of censorship” on his platforms. He admits that “what started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions shut out people with different ideas.” It’s all very MAGA, and opponents of wokism will be thrilled to hear it. He’s even decided to move his content review teams from California and Texas.

But that’s not the important part.

The important part starts at timestamp 3:51, right at the end. That’s where he says:

Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world going after American companies and pushing to censor more.

The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country.

The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.

But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it.

He might as well have added Australia to the list.

Contrary to the claims of the global intelligentsia, freedom of speech is not a universal value. And contrary to the beliefs of most conservatives, it is not a Western value. It is an American value. But as Lafayette recognized more than 200 years ago, the very existence of the United States as “the land of the free” creates pressure on other countries to follow suit. In the nineteenth century, people simply left more repressive countries to start new lives in America. In the twentieth century, the United States forced Europeans to accept basic freedoms, or forgo American protection. And in the twenty-first century, America provided an online space where anyone could speak freely, regardless of their own countries’ efforts to stop them.

Zuckerberg is absolutely right: if the U.S. government can censor, no one else anywhere will be able to speak freely.

And he’s right to be excited about his new alliance with Donald Trump (and implicitly with Elon Musk). When it comes to seeking U.S. support to resolve his regulatory problems in the European Union, Brazil, and indeed Australia, Zuckerberg is certainly not motivated strictly by altruism. Facebook, Twitter, and Google (sorry: Meta, X, and Alphabet) are American corporate champions, and there’s nothing Trump likes better than to see American corporate champions making money abroad. But whatever the mixture of his motives, the result of his decision to embrace free speech is that hundreds of millions of people inside and outside the U.S. will enjoy freer speech.

Forget about acquiring Greenland, occupying the Panama Canal, or making Canada the 51st state. The apparent agreement among Trump, Musk, and now Zuckerberg to leverage American influence in the interest of American internet giants (and incidentally: the interest of freedom) is world-changing. It means that Canadians won’t have to give up their country to gain freedom of speech. Now they’ll be able to just go online. Liberty has found its asylum. It’s just that no one ever thought it would be Facebook.

I reactivated my Twitter profile when Elon Musk took over. Find me back on Facebook now at: https://www.facebook.com/SalvatoreBabones. And feel free to comment however you like.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

In light of this week’s US election result, let me share another “Philistine” column from my archives, this one from April, 2022. Originally published in Quadrant magazine. Enjoy!

The Philistine

Salvatore Babones, Quadrant magazine, April 2022

The defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 saved American democracy. Not from Donald Trump: he never shut down websites, imprisoned protesters, or sicked the security services on his opponents. No, if anything, the 2020 election saved American democracy for Donald Trump. The four-year Trump pause that began on January 20, 2021, put the grown-ups back in charge in Washington—and the world. Like grown-ups everywhere, they immediately maxed out their credit cards, mortgaged the family home, stabbed their friends in the back, picked fights with the neighbors, gave stern speeches in their coronavirus masks while posing for unmasked selfies at the Superbowl, and offered nuclear weapons to Iran in exchange for promises to stop supporting terrorism and shift to nuclear blackmail instead. Thanks to the 2020 election, we all know what adult democracy looks like.

It's a lucky thing, too. Had there been no coronavirus; had the major media not conspired to suppress the Hunter Biden story; had the election been run under the pre-COVID rules, we would now be blaming Trump—for everything. The phase "imagine if Trump had done that" might never have entered the political lexicon. Ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan? Blame the rank amateurism of Trump's bumbling foreign policy team. Renewed North Korean missile tests? Blame Trump's personal courting of "little rocket man" Kim Jong-un. Russian invasion of Ukraine? Trump was only waiting for his second term to repay his true master in the Kremlin. Inflation a problem? Impeach Trump under the 'emoluments clause' for raising the rack rate at the Trump International Hotel. We would never have known how much better things might have been.

Luckily, the Democrats didn't just gain the Presidency in 2020, but both houses of Congress, too. As a result, the House January 6 Committee is free to conduct its insurrection investigation unhindered by budget constraints, Senate interference, or the rule of law. The investigation is absolutely crucial: not satisfied with blanket smartphone footage (and lacking access to the blanket security camera footage that the Democratic Congress refuses to release), the public wants to know what really happened on that 'darkest day' of American democracy. And the committee will surely confirm that the Capitol occupation constituted an 'insurrection' instigated by then-President Trump against the government of the United States. The committee hopes to bar Trump from running again the Fourteenth Amendment, since if the American people actually want Trump back, they must be insurrectionists too.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, passed in 1868, guaranteed "the equal protection of the laws" to formerly enslaved African-Americans. Incidentally, it also guaranteed the equal protection of the laws to New York real estate developers, Capitol occupiers, and even former insurrectionists—with one exception. It contains a special clause intended to deny equal rights to the erstwhile President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Section 3 of the amendment provided that:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

Parse that, Sydney Law grads. This convoluted language was inserted to deny Davis—a man of modest means—a future living at public expense. Davis had been tried for treason, but acquitted on the clever argument that he had never engaged in treason against the United States because he had renounced his American citizenship before joining the Confederacy. There was thus nothing to prevent his being appointed to a sinecure by a sympathetic southern governor, or even resuming his prewar seat in the US Senate. Thus the careful language in the clause: no one who had "previously taken an oath ... to support the Constitution" and later engaged in insurrection, whatever his citizenship status at the time, could run for Congress or "hold any office ... under the United States". Merely giving "comfort" to the enemies of Nancy Pelosi would, under the Fourteenth Amendment, forever bar any supposed insurrectionist from ever holding office again.

Whatever the Macquarie Street barristers may make of that, careful Quadrant readers will certainly have spotted the loophole. Trump, it turns out, has never "taken an oath ... as an officer of the United States" and thus cannot be penalised for having broken it. That's because the President is not an "officer of the United States". The Constitution is reasonably clear on this point, always distinguishing between the elected leaders of the executive branch and the "officers" appointed to serve them. And even if that implicit distinction were to be ignored, the amendment itself explicitly enumerates the key positions from which insurrectionists are barred, and does not mention the presidency. Its framers seem to have felt that if Jefferson Davis had the [rhymes with 'walls'] to run for president, he was welcome to give it a shot.

Not to worry: plans are afoot to find other mechanisms through which Trump can be prevented from running for a second term as president (or, should he be afflicted by an unlikely case of humility, a first term as vice president). Unfortunately for the Democrats, most of these plans involve state laws to keep Trump off ballots, and the Republicans control most of the state legislatures. The fourteen states that the Democrats control outright would back Hillary Clinton anyway (did you really think she would sit this one out?). So absent a wave of never-Trump victories in the 2022 midterm elections—about as likely as a wave of viral TikTok dance videos emerging from the US Senate—the only person who can stop Trump from running in 2024 is ... Trump. Or God, should He decide to intervene. And even on that, the Constitution is vague.

Nothing says 'democracy' like passing special laws to prevent your opponents from running for office. Still, if the self-described Democratic Party were to succeed in banning Trump, they might be doing the Republicans a favor. Today's Republican Party has a deep bench of talented demagogues who embrace Trump's policies and appeal to the Trump electorate but are not yet blocked on Twitter. Trump himself remains the most-disliked politician in America, beating even President Brandon (just) —though it must be admitted that data are not currently available for Hillary Clinton, who holds the unique distinction of being the only presidential candidate ever to become less popular after losing an election. Unsuccessful politicians usually receive an opinion poll bounce as the public forgets their foibles and reassesses their accomplishments. But during the first two years of the Trump administration, Hillary's approval rating actually fell a further 6 points.

Gallup hasn't done any polling on Hillary for four years now, but it may have to reboot its Clinton operation after the 2022 midterms. It will certainly have to reboot Trump. Gallup polled non-President Clinton continuously for 26 years, from 1992 to 2018, but ceased its Trump polling immediately after the Capitol occupation, pegging him permanently at an all-time low of 34%. In fact, it seems that no one has done any Trump polling since he left office. When pollsters don't ask an obvious question, it's usually because they don't want to know the answer. Can't live with him, can't live without him? That may sum up America's relationship with its least popular president since Andrew Johnson, who after all was only impeached once. Only Trump could have trumped that. It seems that Trump does everything bigly—even impeachment.

If (no, let's face it: when) Trump runs for president in 2024, it seems unlikely that he will face any serious opposition for the Republican Party nomination. The never-Trumpers are a dying breed, and one that Trump supporters are actively hunting to extinction. But the Democrats will field an opponent ("anyone but Hillary", we can hear the party faithful crying), and sometimes even a Zoom avatar on mute can beat the most disliked man in America. Whoever the Democrats run, remember that the presidency is not a popularity contest. As America's record voter turnout proved in 2020, it's unpopularity that drives the race. Electioneering is a blood sport, and it's blood the voters are out for. No one watches Squid Game for the victories. Democracy, too, is all about the losers. Nothing beats the satisfaction of stepping into the voting booth, pulling a lever, and whispering to the losing candidate: "you're fired".

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

The United States presidential election is right around the corner, and the fear factor is palpable. But in reality there's little to fear, at least in the near term. The Biden-Harris administration had four years to end freedom of speech and take away your guns, but instead Harris went on national television to brag about her Glock. And when Trump had his four years in office, he declined to "lock her up" and somehow forgot to sign that executive order reinstating Jim Crow. Our futures are not at risk. Democracy is not on the ballot. Forget the inflammatory rhetoric -- on both sides. Trump is not Hitler, Harris is not Stalin, and there are no fascists or communists in America. Even those few Americans who have historically fooled themselves into believing that they were either fascists or communists have recoiled when confronted with actual, real-world fascism and communism. All Americans value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We simply differ over the best ways to achieve them.

But since the end of the Second World War there has arisen in America a political tendency that does have something in common with both fascism and communism, and that's militarism. American liberals as disparate as Dwight D. Eisenhauer ("the military-industrial complex") and C. Wright Mills ("the power elite") warned us about it, and anyone can see the difference between the ("inward-focused" or "isolationist," take your pick) America that existed before 1940 and the ("liberal internationalist" or "imperialist," take your pick) America that emerged after 1945. There are good arguments for and against the United States maintaining a large military, and there are good arguments for and against the United States using that military abroad. Leave these aside. The facts are that the United States does have a large military, and it does use it, for good and/or for bad.

And with a large military comes the rise of militarism.

Before September 11, 2001, militarism was a powerful but never a dominant force in American politics. Of course there was a defense lobby, of course there were jingoistic journalists, and of course the intelligence agencies looked to take care of themselves. But what once only one interest group among many became, over the course of the "War on Terror," became the dominant interest group. Anyone who reflects on the otherwise bizarre fact that Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris can see that. The Bushes, the Clintons (or at least the Rodhams), the Cheneys, the Obamas, and the rest of the first families of the American political establishment are all essentially militarists. They are many other things as well, good and bad (depending on your policy preferences). But for all of them, control over (or perhaps being controlled by) the security state is the dominant fact of their political careers.

That's not because they are bad people. It's because there is so very much money to be made from militarism -- and you don't have to be particularly smart to make it. Consider Ukraine. Unambiguously: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 and bears full moral responsibility for waging a brutal war of aggression against a peaceful neighbor. It is reasonable (maybe right, maybe wrong; you be the judge) for the United States to support Ukraine in its efforts to retain its independence. But why were so many Americans doing business in Ukraine before 2022? Why was the serving vice president's son, Hunter Biden, a "consultant" there in the early 2010s? And why was the future Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, a "consultant" there in the early 2010s? Why were so many well-connected Americans making so much money in a relatively poor eastern European country with minimal trade ties to the United States? They certainly weren't there for the oil.

Ukraine is a marcher land of the American sphere (or the "American Tianxia," as I called it in my 2017 book). The marches are military frontiers where civil oversight is weak and shady fortunes can more easily be made. Easy money is the bane of orderly government; people will bully, bribe, and even kill for it. Apple and Google have made many people fabulously wealthy, but there are no (credible) stories of American political institutions having been undermined to murder, imprison, or otherwise silence opponents in the tech wars. Such stories are rife in relation to Ukraine. And not only in relation to Ukraine; in relation to Central America, the Middle East, and anywhere else where there is easy money to be made -- and protected. Military marches are the graveyards of republics and the rule of law. They are absolutely hostile to the liberal principles on which the United States was founded, and that underlie its continued prosperity.

The American militarists are not particularly concentrated in either political party; they seek to control both. From 2001 through 2016, they succeeded. And then, to paraphrase Polanyi, society acted to protect itself. In 2016, two outsider candidates challenged the militarist establishment that controlled the Democratic and Republican parties. In reality, it was not so much that the outsiders mounted challenges; outsiders had mounted challenges in every previous election, to little effect. The miracle wasn't the challenges; the miracle was that people of conscience in both parties flocked to the challengers. The 15 Republicans who ran against Donald Trump all ran against Donald Trump, not each other, but actual Republican voters chose Trump. And of course Hiliary Clinton ran against Bernie Sanders, who won the support of much of the party's rank-and-file. It took all the strength of the Democratic Party machinery to keep them down -- and him out.

My fellow progressives: it should give you pause for thought that Matt Taibbi, Glen Greenwald, Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have all lined up behind Donald Trump, whether explicitly or implicitly.

My fellow conservatives: it should likewise give you pause for thought that the Cheneys, Goldman Sachs, the intelligence agencies, and the retired generals have all lined up behind Kamala Harris.

The last eight years have witnessed a battle for the soul of the Republican Party, a battle that the militarists have definitively lost. The Republican Party is now a Trumpian Party. Whether or not you want Trumpian policies in government, it is good for American that the Trumpians are now in charge of the Republican Party. Would you rather have the Bushes? There will always be a Republican Party, and someone will always run it. Democracy requires choices, and Trump is offering a classic Republican choice: deregulation, lower taxes, punitive tariffs, and social conservatism. Those may not be your choices, but America would hardly be a democracy if the people who want those things were not allowed to vote for them. The complete rejuvenation of the Republican Party over the last eight years has turned it into the party that most Republican voters wanted to have in the first place. Now they have it.

No such rejuvenation has occurred for the Democrats. The Democratic Party remains the party of organized labor, welfare advocates, vulnerable groups, and salaried professionals. But it is a party controlled by the militarists. Joe Biden ran on a "buy American" platform under which he promised to use government procurement to steer jobs to unionized manufacturers; did you hear a word about that after November 2020? Where are the universal healthcare, the reparations for slavery, and the moral foreign policy? You may or may not want these things, but Democratic Party voters want these things. Bernie Sanders would have advanced these causes, and more. But Democratic voters were not given a straight-up fair choice in 2016, nor in 2020, nor in 2024. Three presidential elections in a row have seen the Democratic Party nominee chosen by insiders and imposed on the party. And why? Because where there is easy money to be made, democracy can wait.

The enduring strength of American democracy is its capacity for renewal. The Republican Party has been completely rejuvenated since 2016. The Bushes, Cheneys, and Boltons are out, and they're never coming back. And whether or not you personally like that, most Republicans like that. And in America, alone among the world's major democracies, it's the voters who decide who our candidate will be.

The Democratic Party remains under militarist control. Not only that; the Republican militarists have migrated to the Democratic Party, having nowhere else to go. Until the Democratic Party experiences a similar rejuvenation, American democracy will remain only partially reformed.

That's why I believe the reelection of Donald Trump is necessary for the renewal of American democracy. Only a thumping Trump victory can jolt the Democratic Party into reform. Trump has been so thoroughly demonized among ordinary Democrats that if Harris wins, it'll be "good enough" that she's kept Trump out. That's not good enough. Even for progressive Democrats, it's better to have four years in the wilderness during which the party completely reforms itself than four years in power that reinforces the militarist grip on the party. Consider this: Harris has welcomed the anti-Trump Republicans into the Democratic fold. How will that change the party, if she has four years in office to solidify the new condominium?

And consider this: when RFK Jr. joined Trump on stage to condemn big pharma, big agra, and the CIA, the MAGA audience cheered. In line with Kennedy, I am one of the five or ten percent of Americans who are crossover Sanders-Trump supporters. We may be in the minority, but we're the minority who will determine the outcome of this election. We're not Republicans, or even Trumpians. We're populist reformers. And we're all anti-militarists.

Ever since its founding, the United States has been compared to the Roman Republic. And to repurpose an aphorism, Rome didn't fall in a day. The vast, corrupt fortunes that undermined the Roman Republic were made in "the east" -- that is to say, in the military marches on the edge of the growing Republic's expanding sphere of control. There was easy money to be made staging coups and inviting interventions in the marcher lands of Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine, far from the oversight of a nosy senate and activist tribunes, and ambitious Romans made it. In the last century of the Republic, a new class of Romans exploited the military machinery of the legions and the administrative machinery of the state to serve their own personal interests. At first, they couldn't do it in Italy -- the city of Rome itself was sacrosanct -- but once they had made enough money in the marches, they ultimately undermined the Republic at home.

The Roman Republic wasn't overthrown by rogue generals or barbarian invaders. It was undermined by its own political class. If the American Republic ever falls, it will fall in the same way: from within. That fall is, thankfully, not imminent. Nor is it ever likely to occur, though "ever" is a long time. It will, however, be forestalled if Americans of all political persuasions stand up against the militarists in their ranks. What we need is a Republican Party that reflects the broad preferences of the majority of Republicans and a Democratic Party that reflects the broad preferences of the majority of Democrats. That's how the primary system works: it lets people on both sides vie for the votes of people in the middle. Primaries are the unique strength of American democracy, and our safeguard against authoritarian rule. Republicans have now had three free and open primaries in a row. It's time the Democrats had one -- in 2028.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

At the conclusion of the November 2022 US midterm elections I confidently predicted that:

The compromise solution was to keep Biden out of sight for a few years, then let him 'make history' by resigning … the 2024 election cycle will begin in earnest next March, and Kamala Harris will be running from the Oval Office.

As America heads to the polls again — with Kamala Harris on the ballot — I think it’s time to revisit one of my favorite “Philistine” columns. Enjoy!

The Philistine, Salvatore Babones, November 2022

They wanted to make history. They got Kamala Harris.

Exactly why anyone would want Kamala Harris is something of a mystery. She didn't marry until she was just shy of her fiftieth birthday. It is, of course, barbarically sexist to comment on a successful woman's romantic life (just ask Gladys), but in Harris's case it's relevant. She got her start in politics at the tender age of 29 when her romantic partner at the time, the 60-year-old speaker of the California state legislature, appointed her to a high-pay, low-work sinecure on the California Medical Assistance Commission. Nothing to see here; move along. Down with the Patriarchy.

After more than a decade in (appointed) government employment, Harris ran for and won the elected post of San Francisco District Attorney in 2004. Yes, America elects its local prosecutors (as well as its sheriffs, accountants, and dog-catchers). In her first two years in office, Harris suspended the use of the death penalty for murder, created a special hate crimes unit, and offered convicted drug dealers the option to study for a degree instead of going to prison. When violent crime spiked, she switched to throwing offenders in jail—and throwing away the key.

Harris's new 'tough on crime' persona alienated progressives, but propelled her to state-level office. In 2010, she was elected California's Attorney General with the endorsement of the state's two long-time senators (Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer) and her local very long-time congresswoman (one Nancy Pelosi). With such powerful party stalwarts underwriting her campaign, Harris was able to win a whopping 33.6 percent of the vote in the Democratic Party primary. Her six male opponents split the remaining two-thirds, leaving Harris in command of the field. Score: Harris 1, Patriarchy 0.

In the ensuing general election, the perennially successful Democratic candidate for everything Jerry Brown handily won the governor's race with a 51-44 victory over the perennially unsuccessful Republican candidate for everything, Meg Whitman. Lower down the ticket, Harris snuck through with a plurality of 46.1 percent, just pipping her (male) Republican opponent's 45.3 percent of the vote. Sore: Harris 2, Patriarchy 0.

Now, in American elections, particularly at the state level, most people just pull a big lever that is labeled either "D" or "R", without paying much attention to the actual names listed under each. In that 2010 California state election, the Democratic Party candidate for governor won by a margin of 1.3 million votes. The Democratic Party candidate for lieutenant governor won by 1.1 million. For secretary of state, by 1.4 million; for state controller, by 1.8 million; for state treasurer, by 2 million; for insurance commissioner, by 1.2 million. Harris won her election by a mere 74,453 votes. For anyone to even notice a down-ticket candidate like Harris was remarkable. That people disliked her enough to specifically vote against her in the midst of a Democratic Party landslide is truly astonishing.

In any well-functioning political party, that election squeaker would have been the end of Kamala Harris's aspirations for higher office. Like the similarly-loathed Meg Whitlam, she might have been made ambassador to Kenya. But Harris was destined (earmarked?) for bigger things. When Barbara Boxer retired from the Senate in 2016, Harris ran for her seat, receiving the endorsements of ... Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Emily's List, and the California Democratic Party itself (yes, in America the parties can officially endorse candidates for their own nominations). The only prominent Democrat who didn't endorse her was Hillary Clinton. Eight years earlier, Harris had endorsed Obama for the nomination, and we all know who holds a grudge. It isn't the Patriarchy.

With such high-calibre support, it's no wonder that Harris won the primary election with a resounding plurality of 37.9% of the vote. To be fair, the California primary system is complicated, and many of those who voted against Harris were actually Republicans. But 'The Philistine' is a humor column, and it is under no obligation to be fair. Harris was hated all the way to Washington.

Simply put: no one likes Kamala Harris. No one even feels bad for not liking her. Her boss doesn't like her; her aides don't like her; even her Irish terrier doesn't like her. Harris featured it (no one knows the sex) in a single 2018 Facebook post for National Puppy Day, calling the one-year-old her "office dog", which implies that she never actually took it home. Now presumably five years old (and hopefully still alive), the dog was never seen or heard from again.

This unpopular but well-connected puppy-hater from San Francisco is the candidate whom the Democratic Party has anointed to 'make history' as the first female President of the United States. Yes, President. Not only will Harris make history as the first female President; she will make double-history as the first female President of Color.

When the Democratic Party establishment united behind candidate Joe Biden in 2020, it wasn't because they liked him, or thought that he would make a good president. It was to keep the insurgent but surging Bernie Sanders off the ticket and out of the White House. As the Philistines like to say, si cambia il maestro di cappella, ma la musica è sempre quella. Sanders had swept the first three primaries, and his only serious opponents were the 'my two dads' McKinsey consultant Pete Buttigieg and a person named Amy Klobuchar. Scared to death that a socialist version of Donald Trump might sweep to power and drain their own particular corner of the swamp, the party elders (and in this case, that term is meant to be taken literally) cut a deal. They agreed to back Biden—but only if he would set up Harris as his successor.

By this point, Harris had already dropped out of the race. But she had been the only African-American woman in it, and there was no way the Democratic Party was going to run two white men at the top of the ticket in 2020. If Biden wanted the nomination, he would have to share it with a woman. But which woman? A Democratic Party grandee named Jim Clyburn saw his chance to answer that question, and he took it.

The next primary on the calendar was in South Carolina, and Clyburn had represented South Carolina in Congress since 1993. The octogenarian African-American was one of the few remaining veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, and was the African-American kingmaker in a state where African-Americans accounted for more than 60 percent of the Democratic vote. Clyburn had repeatedly pledged not to endorse a candidate before the South Carolina primaries were decided, but Biden needed help, and Clyburn was in a position to exact a price for that help. His price was Kamala Harris.

With Clyburn's timely endorsement, Biden swept South Carolina, and one week later the rest of the south. Clyburn duly cashed his chits. He went on national television to urge Biden to select an African-American woman as his running mate, because "African-American women needed to be rewarded for their loyalty". He might just as well have added "and because if you don't, you'll pay for it". Of course, Biden chose Harris, and he's been paying for it ever since.

That's how the Democratic Party got a presidential candidate that few people wanted, paired with a vice presidential candidate that nobody liked. Biden was simply the 'candidate who could beat Trump'; there was no alternative. All of the other contenders—'Red' Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth 'Pocahontas' Warren, Michael 'Mini Mike' Bloomberg, Pete 'Millennial Mayor' Buttigieg, and Amy 'Who?' Klobuchar—were fundamentally unelectable. The party faithful wanted a young, female, (preferably non-binary) Person of Color to waive their rainbow flag, but what the party establishment wanted most of all was to beat Donald Trump. The compromise solution was to keep Biden out of sight for a few years, then let him 'make history' by resigning. That was the only way to give America the virtue signal it desperately needed but stubbornly refused to elect.

Sixty percent of Americans think that Joe Biden is unfit to be president, and the other sixty percent feel the same way about Donald Trump. But all 120% loathe Kamala Harris. No matter; she'll make double-history all the same. The 2024 election cycle will begin in earnest next March, and Kamala Harris will be running from the Oval Office. It's no wonder that the Democrats are desperate to see Trump put safely behind bars before the race begins. Trump couldn't beat an empty podium in today's America, but he'll trounce Kamala Harris. Score: Trump 2, Establishment 0.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

When India’s prime minister Narendra Modi met Russia's Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin in July, he was photographed hugging the Russian dictator—even as NATO leaders were meeting in Washington to discuss the Ukraine war. Six weeks later, he was photographed hugging Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv. What gives?

The Indian Century Roundtable has just published a landmark paper by Prof. Ramesh Thakur explaining “India’s Shifting Balance of Interests Vis-à-vis Russia”:

• Ramesh Thakur | India’s Shifting Balance of Interests Vis-à-vis Russia

Prof. Thakur, a former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, and a Senior Scholar of the Brownstone Institute. He is an expert on both Russian/Soviet and Indian international relations. We couldn’t ask for a better guide to the topic than him.

In his paper, Prof. Thakur writes that:

Outsiders often fail to understand what drives democratic India’s intimate ties with authoritarian Russia because they don’t see the world as viewed through Indian eyes and minds. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, India’s stance has both puzzled and irritated Western friends and commentators but is consistent with the trajectory of India’s foreign policy that seeks to balance a range of interests and principles in bilateral relations and multilateral forums. The US is India’s single most important global partner and there is a broad national consensus underpinning that. Yet it is also in India’s interest to remain engaged with other non-Western countries and groupings in pursuit of strategic autonomy.

He traces the India-Russia relationship back to the Cold War, a time when the United States was not always friendly to India, and indeed armed and trained India’s arch-rival, Pakistan. Prof. Thakur writes that in this period “the intimacy of the Indo–Soviet relationship was based on conjunctions of political, military and economic interests.” Nonetheless, according to Prof. Thakur,

The relationship was an ideological misfit from the start. One country was the world’s largest democracy with a bewildering myriad of political parties (including several variants of the communist party), competing trade unions and a robust press. The other was the most powerful communist state where the party claimed a monopoly of political and trade union activity and the press was entirely subservient to the interests of the ruling regime. Marxist ideology is the antithesis to the caste-dominated majority Hindu society of India. Culture and education turned Indian minds to the West rather than to the Soviet Union.

After the dramatic events of 1990-1991, which included not only the breakup of the Soviet Union but also the end of India’s “license Raj” and the opening of the Indian economy, the India-Russia relationship became more transactional. Prof. Thakur writes that “India scrambled to readjust to the changed unipolar world and recalibrate relations with the US while still heavily dependent on Soviet military supplies.” These changes ushered in three decades during which the United States was eager to improve relations with India—and to develop India as a market for military exports. This period of accommodation and courtship came to an end with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Overt aggression by Russia, China, and (it must be remembered) the United States in various conflicts around the world has led India to be more circumspect about its partnerships and relationships. And not only India. Prof. Thakur reminds us that:

In a world characterised by such great-power behaviour, countries outside the rivalry between the democratic West and key authoritarian states judge their own long-term interests lies in minimising the chances of a major power war, protecting the fragile nuclear peace, creating a rules based order that is respected by all powers and in the meantime hedging their bets against geopolitical shocks in their own immediate region. The lodestar of their foreign policy will continue to be the safety, security, prosperity and wellbeing of their own people first.

As Prof. Thakur explains:

When making decisions, governments must strive for a balance among different sectors and groups domestically, among different nations and groups internationally, and between material interests and ethical principles. India resents and reacts irritably to being lectured by Westerners on foreign policy moralism because it is not and never has been prepared to outsource the calculation of its balance of interests on any issue to foreigners.

Indian commentators never tire of pointing out that Europe spends more on Russian gas than India spends on Russian oil. Even more ironic is the fact that Europe buys Russian oil back from India in the form of refined petroleum and diesel fuel. Yet Western commentators continue to malign India for importing discounted Russian oil, despite the fact that India (with a GDP per capita of USD $2800) can much less afford the luxury of choosing its suppliers than the European Union (with $42,500).

On balance, India tends to be a force for stability in the world. India may not always condemn aggression, but it never supports aggression. When it comes to the Ukraine war, India may buy weapons from Russia, but it doesn't sell weapons to Russia. Most of all, much like Australia, the European Union, or indeed the United States, India sees no reason to take sides in conflicts where its own interests are not at stake.

Prof. Thakur’s paper is a must-read for anyone who has been mystified by India’s relationship with Russia or Modi’s embrace of Putin. It lays out the history and explains the logic of Indian foreign policy-making. And it brings us closer to a genuine understanding of India. Once again, the paper can be read online or downloaded as a PDF from the Indian Century Roundtable website at:

• Ramesh Thakur | India’s Shifting Balance of Interests Vis-à-vis Russia

I’m sure that you will enjoy the paper as much as I did.

I started the Indian Century Roundtable think tank almost two years ago with help from members of the Indian-Australian community. Since then, the organization has raised enough money to pay for professional services, establish a small reserve, and (most importantly) commission research. Prof. Thakur’s paper on “India’s Shifting Balance of Interests Vis-à-vis Russia” is our fourth paper, following papers from:

• Salvatore Babones | Inside the V-Dem Rankings

• Vikram K. Malkani | Understanding Aadhaar: India's National Identification Initiative

• Salvatore Babones | The Weaponization of Caste in America

For me, the Roundtable is an entirely volunteer (that is: unpaid) effort. But even with me contributing my time for free, the organization does have expenses. We receive no government assistance, of any kind, from any government. Nor does my university contribute. Instead, we rely entirely on the more than 500 people who have given their own money to support the Indian Century Roundtable. If you would like to support our work, and you are financially able to do so, please consider donating at:

• GoFundMe | Indian Century Roundtable Launch Fund

The Indian Century Roundtable is now a going concern and an established feature of the global India-focused think tank ecosystem. We are financially stable. But we are not yet at the point where we can hire even a single staff member. I’m happy to give my time for free, but some (paid) support staff would be very welcome. If you or anyone you know would like to sponsor our work at a level that would allow me to hire one or more full-time staff members, please do be in touch. Until then, thank you for your well-wishes, and be sure to read Prof. Thakur’s paper!

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

Today, everyone knows what and where is the country called “India.” But India was not always India. For many Indians, it was (and is) “Bharat.” For others, most famously Winston Churchill, it was merely a “an abstraction”:

“India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.” — Winston Churchil, 1931

As history played out, in 1947 British India was divided by majority religion, resulting in the horrors of Partition. But it could have been divided by language, or by geography, or by historical antecedents. Most of India’s Hindu independence leaders — Gandhi, Nehru, Savarkar, Ambedkar, Prasad, and others — wanted to inherit an undivided India. Jinnah, as head of the Muslim League, refused to play ball.

But 1947 wasn’t the first time India was divided. What is now Sri Lanka was hived off by having a different governance structure under the British crown from early in the nineteenth century. Burma was hived off in 1937 (a mere decade before independence) as a separate administrative unit. Nepal and Bhutan were allowed to remain dependencies by the British, and thus retained independent. The map could have been very different.

This Independence Day, I’ve recorded a video presentation explaining how the various bids for “nations” to be carved out of British India were informed by nineteenth century Western political theory and played out against the backdrop of World War One, the breakup of empires and the League of Nations:

• YouTube | The Western Foundations of Indian Nationalism

Few people remember how prominent John Stuart Mill, Leo Tolstoy, and most of all Giuseppe Mazzini were in the minds of India’s independence leaders. To give just a tiny teaser: Gandhi traced his doctrine of non-violence to Mazzini, and Savarkar translated Mazzini into Marathi. It really is a fascinating bit of forgotten intellectual history.

The major faultlines of Indian politics today — the INC/BJP split — can be traced directly to differing conceptions of the Indian nation (and Muslims’ place in it). Those ideas of the nation themselves ultimately derive from different readings of Mazzini. I very much enjoyed telling a little piece of this story, and I hope you will enjoy watching it.

Happy Indian Independence Day. Jai Hind!

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

There are two major national political parties in India: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of prime minister Narendar Modi and the Indian National Congress (INC) of opposition figurehead Rahul Gandhi. In the recently completed 2024 elections, the BJP won 36.6% of the national vote (down 0.8% from 2019) while the INC won 21.2% (up 1.7%). No other party won more than 5% of the total popular vote, and no other party won a meaningful vote share outside its home state.

• Sunday with Salvatore | Let's Talk about the Indian Election!

In short, India has a nascent two-party system, which is complicated by the local dominance of many single-state parties. In a first-past-the-post system like India’s, this means that similar vote shares can yield wildly divergent results. For example, although the BJP’s vote share declined by less than 1 percentage point in the recent election, its seat count declined from 303 to 240 in India’s 543-seat lower house. In fact, the BJP had won 282 seats with 31.0% of the vote in 2014, compared to 240 seats with 36.6% of the vote in 2024.

Similarly, the INC went from 44 seats with 19.3% of the vote in 2014 to 52 seats with 19.5% in 2019 to 99 seats with 21.2% in 2024. An increase of less than 2 percentage points in vote share between 2014 and 2024 led to a better-than-double number of seats. Due to the complexities of first-past-the-post in a multiparty system, the BJP now has 41 more seats than it would have under proportional representation, while the INC has 16 seats fewer than it would have garnered. That may seem unfair, but the situation is more complicated than it sounds. If India actually did have proportional representation, both parties would have pursued different electoral strategies.

Most political analyses of the election results have focused on the fact that the BJP will now have to rely on coalition partners to remain in government. This is a red herring. All of the BJP’s coalition partners are single-state parties. They will be more concerned to win local concessions for their states and electorates than to influence national policy. A highway here and a cricket stadium is all it will take to buy them off. These parties will have little incentive to bring down the government, since (1) they stand little to gain from fresh elections and (2) were they instead to join the INC in a grand coalition of minor parties, they would be competing with half a dozen other state parties for central government give-aways.

Take-away: unlike some past coalition governments, this will be a relatively stable coalition.

On the other side of politics, the near-doubling of the number of seats going to the INC will give the party’s beleaguered establishment a new lease on life. The national INC has been on life support for ten years, with “the Family” (the Nehru-Gandhi family, no relation to the Mahatma) fiercely resisting reform. The INC is a dynatic party in a sense completely unfamiliar to Americans, but entirely characteristic of the postcolonial world. It is, quite simply, a family party. The United States has its Clintons and Bushes, but neither of these families outright controls the political party with which it is associated. In India, the Gandhi family literally decides who will get the INC hand (see above) to run in national elections.

That may (or may not) be good for the Family, but it is a problem for the INC, and a problem for India. In a rapidly modernizing country like India, with a fractious news media and relentlessly competitive politics, the age of the family party is over. Like the Daleys in Chicago, family dynasties may still flourish now and again at the local level, but no one seriously believes that family-run parties are the future of 21st century democratic politics. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.” Too many international commentators seem to forget this Common Sense when writing about Third World democracy.

If the INC had remained stuck at 40-50 seats this election, the Family would have come under serious pressure to loosen its grip over the party’s bureaucratic machinery after a third straight electoral defeat. But the near-doubling of seats means that a whole new cohort of INC parliamentarians owes their jobs directly to the Family. As a result, internal party reform has been delayed for at least a decade, since even if the INC does poorly in 2029, the party will still nurture hopes of a bounce-back in 2034. And although a family-run INC may still sting the modern, bureaucratic BJP (as it did this year), it is unlikely ever to beat it.

Take-away: India will lack a robust national opposition party for at least another decade.

The BJP may have “lost” the 2024 election, but it still has more than double the seats of the INC, which clearly did not “win” the election. Having grown fat with complacency fostered by PM Narendra Modi’s personal popularity, the BJP will emerge from this election a leaner, hungrier party. Its organizational machine — for it is an organizational machine — will be running in top gear from now until 2029. The INC, by contrast, will remain an old-style, clientelistic family organization. It will not be able to mount a coherent national opposition to the BJP. Its party figurehead (who is still not its party leader) Rahul Gandhi may be able to win the occasional soundbite, but he will lack the bureaucratic machinery needed to win a national election.

If anyone would like to discuss this in more detail, join my livestream on YouTube this Sunday (June 9) Australia/India time, or Saturday night US time, at:

• Sunday with Salvatore | Let's Talk about the Indian Election!

I hope to see many of you there!

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

Leonard Mosley’s famous 1961 account of the partition of India, The Last Days of the British Raj, opens with what he considered the self-evident observation that:

You do not need to be a chemist, nor do you need to be in India for very long, before you realize that its widely disparate peoples have one thing in common: a remarkably low boiling point so far as political temper is concerned. Nowhere in the world does a mob respond so quickly or so saveagely to a firebrand’s call for action.

Yet India just held its 18th national election since independence, with only scattered reports of election-related violence. In fact, none of India’s elections — even those held following major outbreaks of civil unrest — has been accompanied by widespread violence. Indians do not riot after losing elections. They do not stage pogroms after winning elections. They accept the outcome, and start preparing for the next polls.

That may be why India’s democracy is rock-solid. Other democracies in countries with socioeconomic profiles that are similar to India’s have proven much more fragile. Consider that India’s GDP per capita is roughly on a par with that of Papua New Guinea (and half that of Indonesia). Or consider that India is surrounded by Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. And then consider India’s democratic track record. It is truly phenomenal.

One major (though not the only) challenge to democracy in these other countries has been a lack of consensus among their populations on common membership in a single national community. Most Western democratic scaremongering focuses on the supposed threat from Nazi and Fascist takeovers, but in reality civil war has been a much more frequent cause of democratic collapse. Just think about the only real crisis of American democracy: that’s right, it was a civil war.

Or to paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” all hell breaks loose.

It was with these considerations in mind that I penned my most recent contribution to The Australian:

• Indian Elections Demonstrate that Patriotism Is the Key to Democracy

It’s paywalled (sorry), but the gist of the article is that “in the fragile and febrile environment of a poor developing country, widespread respect for national institutions is needed for democracy to survive” — and good, old-fashioned patriotism is simplest and most straightforward way to ensure that people respect their national institutions.

Survey data from the Pew Research Center show 96 per cent of Indians believe that to be ‘truly Indian’ it is important to stand for the national anthem, 94 per cent believe it is important to respect the country’s laws, and 95 per cent believe it is important to respect the military. In other words, nearly everyone is what we might broadly define as ‘patriotic’. I don’t have comparative data for other countries, but I can’t imagine that many countries match these kinds of figures.

Most political scientists seem to believe that this kind of knee-jerk patriotism is the first step on the slippery slope to dictatorship. But the poor, postcolonial South does not face the same challenges as the rich, postmodern West. When leading American politicians proclaim that the United States is a ‘racist’ country rampant with ‘white supremacy’ (especially among its police forces), there is little danger that members of non-white racial groups will rise up in armed rebellion. Try that trick in Papua New Guinea, and the result is deadly violence at the polls.

Patriotism is certainly not the only ‘social requisite of democracy’, to use Seymour Martin Lipset’s famous phrase. But it is perhaps one of the most important, especially for new countries with contested national identities. More than a century after the death of sociology’s founding father Emile Durkheim, social scientists still don’t understand the origins of social solidarity. To a great extent, we have given up trying. Maybe it’s time that we went back to basics, seeking to understand what keeps society together, instead of focusing so much of our attention on the ways we can pick it apart.

Congratulations, India, on an election well-fought — and best wishes for many more.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

Australia’s 2025 election campaign kicked off this week with the Treasurer’s budget speech and the opposition leader’s reply. And both parties put international student numbers on the agenda. Labor’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers pledged to “limit how many international students can be enrolled by each university based on a formula, including how much housing they build.” The Liberal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton responded with a pledge to “reduce excessive numbers of foreign students studying at metropolitan universities to relieve stress on rental markets in our major cities, promising to “work with universities to set a cap on foreign students.”

At last: the game is afoot.

I am no opponent of internationalization, or of immigration. I’m an immigrant myself. But there’s a difference between internationalization and exploitation. Internationalization is ensuring that classes include students from diverse backgrounds in order to inject diverse perspectives and foster intercultural experiences. Exploitation is running entire onshore courses specifically for international students, often as the price they must pay to access Australia’s low-wage labor market for convenience store clerks and Uber Eats drivers.

When I arrived in 2008, Australia already had the most internationalized university system in the world. There had been a ten-year run-up in international student numbers to globally unprecedented levels. But things were only about to kick into high gear.

Since 2008, the number of international students at Australia’s public universities has doubled. In 2022 (the latest year for which data are available) Australian public universities were 30% international by student load. The numbers were 24% for undergraduate students and 48% for postgraduate students. To put these numbers into perspective the single most internationalized public university in the entire United States (the University of Illinois) is only 23% international. That’s right: the Australian system as a whole is more international than the most international public universities in America.

And that was 2022, when enrolments were still depressed by the COVID hangover. In 2023, international “higher education” numbers surged 22% in Australia. Historically, public universities have comprised roughly 90% of the higher education sector. So it is very likely that Australian public university international enrolments increased by a further one-fifth in 2023. If that is the case, and if any increase at all continued in 2024, then it is almost certain that more than one-third of all students at Australian public universities are international students. And that doesn’t even include the children of permanent residents or New Zealanders, who count as “domestic” in the statistics. As a rough estimate, it is likely that no more than 60% of all students at Australian public universities are actually Australian citizens.

Into these facts wades the Property Council of Australia with a “myth busting report” claiming that international students are not to blame for Australia’s rental housing crisis. The PCA demonstrates that:

• Only 4% of renters are international students

• Only 9% of apartment renters are international students

• Only 27% of Australian suburbs have international students accounting for greater than 1% of all rentals

This, in a housing market where the nationwide rental vacancy rate is just 0.7%.

According to these figures, if all international students were to suddenly leave Australia, apartment vacancy rates would rise to thirteeen times their current levels.

Of course, if you happen to live in the 73% of Australia where international student numbers are less than 1%, the problem might just be manageable. But for those of us who happen to live in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth instead of in Albany, Bourke, Dubbo, Mildura, or Cape Tribulation, international student concentrations of 9 percent or more seriously warp the apartment rental market. According to the PCA’s own data, capital city rental markets have been swamped by international students. And when it comes to Australians’ own children looking for rentals — in the same university suburbs where international students want to rent — the competition is fierce, and direct.

BUT, we are told … international education is Australia’s third-largest export, surpassed by only iron and coal, contributing $36.4 billion to the Australian economy in 2022-2023 — and thus more than $40 billion today. If only. This figure is arrived at by combining “an average spend estimate from Tourism Research Australia … supplemented by the addition of the total expenditure on course fees.” That is to say: it is based on the fantastical model that a typical international student saves up the full cost of tuition, housing, meals, and incidentals, transfers it to an Australian bank, and then lives on that money for the duration of stay in Australia.

This may be true for a small number of elite university students. But university students make up only 45% of the international student total, and most of those are non-elite. Just watch the 2019 Four Corners special Cash Cows to find out how things really work at a typical university, and then remember that most international students are not even in universities, but in low-level vocational and English-language courses.

The idea that all (or even a substantial portion) of the money spent by these students is transferred from abroad, rather than earned in Australia, is flatly ridiculous. To see that, just remember the uproar that broke out in 2020 when Scott Morrison refused to extend JobKeeper and JobSeeker to international students. Most international students in Australia work very hard, but the fact is that they come to Australia primarily to work, not to study. The tuition they are required to pay is simply part of the cost of their work visas.

“But Salvatore,” you say, “international students are only allowed to work part-time.” Sure. International students are currently allowed to work:

• 24 hours a week in regular employment, when classes are in session

• Unlimited hours during semester breaks (note: Australian universities are typically in session only 26 weeks a year)

• Unlimited hours if they are master’s or PhD research students

In addition:

• The spouses of master’s students can work unlimited hours

• Students can earn unlimited self-employment income

• Much international student employment is in the informal sector, and not properly reported

In short, the entire international student industry is, in essence, a giant immigration scam.

I’m not a xenophobe. I benefit greatly from the international student fees paid to the University of Sydney. I am not an Australian citizen, I have no children attending Australian universities, and I can afford to out-compete international students for scarce Sydney rental space. My biggest competitor in the rental market isn’t international students; it’s AirBnB.

I am a data-driven social scientist who has compiled the numbers on Australia’s international education industry and summarized them in a book and several published papers. You can find the book on Amazon at:

• Australia’s Universities: Can They Reform?

I got involved in this issue because all around me I see lies, lies, and more lies. Universities lie; trade associations lie; government ministers lie; the real estate industry lies; immigration agents lie; everyone is lying. And lies do not make a solid foundation for good public policy formation.

Now, finally, the Hon. Jim Chalmers has injected international education into the national policy debate, and the Hon. Peter Dutton has picket up the gauntlet. It’s time to hash this out. Australia has the most international university system in the world; whatever the country decides to do, no one can reasonably accuse it of xenophobia. A reduction of 50% in Australia’s international student intake would still leave it the most international system in the world, and that’s never going to happen.

We’re only having this debate because international student numbers have become an issue in Australia’s never-ending housing debate. So be it. It’s better to have the debate for the wrong reasons than never to have it at all. But let’s have it. Australia has a deeply mendacious system for international education. I hope that debate will bring exposure, and exposure will bring improvement. If the Leader of the Opposition sticks to his guns, maybe we can talk this through. The next election is probably a year away. That’s just about enough time to cut through all the lies and get things right.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

On behalf of the Free Speech Union of Australia, I am organizing a symposium on Intellectual Freedom in the Academy, to be held the afternoon of May 21 in Melbourne:

• https://freespeechunion.au/news/academicfreedom2024.html

The Free Speech Union will soon be releasing full details of the event, but in the meantime academics and people interested in academia are invited to submit abstracts (directly to me) for presentations that they might make at the symposium. Abstracts are invited for presentations on all issues related to intellectual freedom in the academy, including (but not limited to) topics like:

• Academic freedom in research and teaching

• Viewpoint diversity in the classroom

• Gatekeeping in government grantmaking

• The suppression of politically incorrect science

• The politics of diversity, equity, and inclusion

• The scholarly impacts of indigenisation policies

• How hiring practices shape future scholarship

• Political threats to academic job security

Please e-mail expressions of interest including a title, authors, affiliations, and an abstract of no more than 200 words directly to me at salvatore.babones@sydney.edu.au or by reply to this announcement.

Please note that the symposium will be held in conjunction with a larger FSU event featuring a speech by Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

For full consideration, abstracts should be received by May 3, 2024. Participating scholars will be invited to submit short papers of 2000-5000 words for publication roughly two months after the symposium. We are currently in negotiations to publish the symposium papers in a reputable scholarly venue. The contribution of a paper is not a requirement of participation in the symposium.

The FSU will be setting a registration fee for the symposium, but a full registration fee waiver will be offered to presenters. Please note that travel funding is not available from the organisers for this event. Unfortunately, I currently do not know whether or not the event will be broadcast.

I hope to see some of you in Melbourne, and of course I will let everyone know how things go at the event!

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.

On October 3, 2023, Michael Gawenda published a charmingly personal memoir called My Life as a Jew. Little did he know that his life as a Jew — like all Jewish lives, everywhere — was about to change. The Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 were of course horrific. One might have hoped that the civilized world would close ranks behind Israel, as it had closed ranks behind the United States twenty-two years earlier. Whatever one might think of Israeli “colonialism” or American “empire,” terrorism is terrorism.

Of course, the world did not close ranks behind Israel. Celebrations of Hamas terrorism began the next day in Sydney, and have continued ever since. These celebrations are now held under the cover of “protesting” Israeli military action in Gaza. Interpret that how you will.

I wrote a major review of Gawenda’s My Life as a Jew for Quadrant magazine, submitting it on January 4 under the suggested title “The Jew of Melbourne.” I understood that it was to appear in the March issue. It did not appear. The new editor, Rebecca Weisser, did not approve of my characterization of Gawenda’s approach to Zionism, calling it “a categorical error [that] undermines your authority as a critic.”

Once again, you be the judge … because lacking an alternative venue for a 3000-word review of an Australian book on Jewish life in Australia, I have decided to publish it here via my newsletter. I hope you find it interesting and useful. If you’d like to buy Gawenda’s book (and I recommend that you do), you can find it online at:

• Buy Michael Gawenda’s My Life as a Jew

My review is below.

My Life as a Jew

by Michael Gawenda

Scribe, 2023, 288 pages, $35.00

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum dedicates an entire wall to Martin Niemöller's moving confessional, "First They Came". Niemöller was a Lutheran minister and self-professed prewar antisemite who was ultimately imprisoned in Dachau for opposing the Nazi takeover of Protestant churches. In his postwar lectures on the evils of Nazism and the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust, Niemöller famously reiterated (in many different versions) that:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemöller's claims are not exactly false. But they are less than true. The Nazis did come for a small number of socialists and union leaders, and killed some of them. They also came for Polish conservatives, homosexuals, and Roma, among others. But primarily they came for the Jews. Of the roughly 8 million people killed in the Holocaust, roughly 6 million were Jews. Nearly two-thirds of all European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, accounting for 40 percent of the world's Jewish population at the time. The Holocaust truly was the Shoah, the 'catastrophe' of the Jews.

Millions more Jews became refugees after the war, including the parents of Michael Gawenda, editor of the Melbourne Age from 1997-2004 and author of My Life as a Jew. Gawenda was born in 1947 in a displaced persons camp in Austria. His parents had fled Poland for the Soviet Union just before the German invasion. Gawenda claims that his father was "always a fierce anti-communist", but it is not clear that Gawenda would have known what his father thought before the war (i.e., before he himself was born). What is certain is that Gawenda's family was deeply involved in the 'Bund', a Jewish lay organisation that Gawenda alternately characterises as "working class", "militantly secular", "committed to Yiddish and Yiddish culture", "socialist", "internationalist", and "anti-Zionist" but nonetheless believing in "Jewish peoplehood"—the final damning characteristic that led to the gulag.

It was thus, perhaps, the uncompromising Jewishness of his parents that ultimately led to Gawenda, a self-described "secular left-wing Jew", becoming editor of The Age instead of editor of Pravda (and no: to anticipate the joke, they are not the same thing). Gawenda's own uncompromising Jewishness has in recent years alienated him from elite Australian intellectual life, much of the organised political left, and many of his personal friends. Not his non-Jewish friends; outside of the world of left-wing activist intellectuals, it is a rare Australian gentile who has any problem with overt Jewishness. It was not the intolerance of gentiles, but Gawenda's estrangement from fellow secular Jews, and in particular from his once-close friend Louise Adler, that motivated him to write My Life as a Jew.

Gawenda's friend Adler is best-known as the long-time head of Melbourne University Publishing (2003-2019). She was later the editor of a book series for Monash University Publishing (2019-2023) called 'In the National Interest', and is currently the director of Adelaide Writers' Week. The connection between Gawenda and Adler dates back to the early 1990s when both held editorial positions at The Age. Over the course of three decades, Gawenda and Adler shared the experiences of left-wing Melbourne Jewish intellectual life, fantasising over the book he might have written (and she might have published) under the prospective title Jews and the Left. For Gawenda, this book was "going to be about whether I had changed, drifted right, or whether the left had changed so that I no longer could easily say that I remained, without qualification, a Jew of the left". How Adler felt about that unwritten book remains a mystery.

The book that Gawenda actually did write, My Life as a Jew, opens with an account of the day his friendship with Adler ended, at least for him. On October 9, 2021 Gawenda wrote Adler a letter expressing his sense of betrayal over her commissioning a book by John Lyons for her Monash book series, Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism's Toughest Assignment. Lyons is currently the Global Affairs Editor at the ABC and the book was apparently typical ABC fare: sloppy first-person reportage spiced with allegations about a shadowy 'Israel Lobby' that supposedly exercises veto power over all Western reporting on the country. Both Adler and Lyons had signed one of the many petitions calling on journalists to report the Arab-Israeli conflict from the Palestinian (i.e., the 'victim's') perspective. Gawenda saw Adler's signature of the letter and commissioning of Lyons's book as a betrayal, not so much of their friendship (or even perhaps of their shared Jewishness), as of journalistic integrity.

Since October 7 we have all seen that journalistic integrity is in short supply when it comes to reporting on Israel. For one particularly relevant example, consider the review of Gawenda's My Life as a Jew published by the self-described "progressive, secular" Jew Dennis Altman in The Conversation. Altman, who as a professor at La Trobe University should know something about proper citation, wrote that "Ours is an age of tribalism and Gawenda is honest when he writes: 'I know and have heard Israeli voices in a way I never have the voices of the Palestinians'." That passage is indeed accurately quoted—accurately, and mendaciously. For as Gawenda explains:

Without a fixer to organise interviews and translate ... Western journalists like me could not go to the West Bank or Gaza and confront PA or Hamas politicians. We could not just approach Palestinians on the street and talk to them, certainly not in Gaza, and mostly not in the West Bank. Interviews with Palestinians were organised by the fixer, and those 'ordinary' Palestinians were chosen by Hamas officials.

Or as the New York Times infamously reported on October 17, "Israeli Airstrike Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry Says."  

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My Life as a Jew is obviously both a memoir and a rumination on Jewishness. Most reviewers have favored it as the former: as an openhearted reflection on the challenges of maintaining a Jewish identity in secular, postmodern Australia. Then again, most reviewers have been Jewish. To the gentile reviewer, this is a book about antisemitism, pure and simple. Yes, the bits of poetry are a cute touch, and it's very nice to hear that Gawenda's children have formed a Yiddish folk music troupe. But most readers who do not happen to be Gawenda's close family friends are unlikely to care about his amateur poetry or his children's singing. The reason non-Jews should read this book is to learn how Jews deal with antisemitism.

Before the Holocaust, there was a simple answer to this challenge: be less Jewish. We all know how that turned out. Before the war, Gawenda's parents were Bundist anti-Zionists who opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Israel while advocating the maintenance of Jewish peoplehood in the diaspora. Gawenda grew up in a Bundist exile milieu in Melbourne. His older sisters, born before the war and educated in the actual, living Bund ultimately embraced the idea of Israel: the only place in the world where Jews "are not anxious about being Jewish". Gawenda, educated in a transplanted Australian Bund, stayed in Australia, wondering what it meant to be a 'Jew' when he was neither observant nor religious. In the inevitable logic of memoirs, he never finds out.

But he does relate his experiences of what his Jewishness has meant to others. At the most anodyne level, it meant that as recently as 2006 his editor at The Age (presumably the controversial Andrew Jaspan, though Gawenda doesn't name him) could question whether, as a Jew, Gawenda would be able to cover an Israeli election in an objective manner. Gawenda is too polite to call this antisemitism, but he does admit that he was "furious". Reading between the lines, Gawenda gives the impression that it was not exactly his Jewishness that was the problem, but the fact that he was not a publicly anti-Zionist Jew.

As with most things antisemitic, that must remain a speculation. But the one consistent theme of My Life as a Jew is that a Jew must be militantly anti-Zionist to be accepted in progressive intellectual circles—so militantly anti-Zionist as to be anti-Jewish, or nearly so. It's not enough to support Palestinian statehood, condemn Benjamin Netanyahu, and refer to elements of Israeli administration as "apartheid", "racist", and "authoritarian"—"if not fascist", all of which Gawenda does. To be a "good Jew", in Gawenda's telling, a Jew must in effect disavow Jewish peoplehood, and loudly condemn Israel at every opportunity as a matter of course. Gawenda, who seems to be more a non-Zionist than either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, clearly doesn't make the cut. He vehemently condemns the current Israeli government, but staunchly defends Israel's right to exist.

Gawenda expresses his concern (by explicitly expressing his lack of concern) with "what non-Jewish people will think" of his proclamations of Jewishness and love for Israel. If he sat down and re-read his own book from beginning to end, he might come to the realisation that he is much more concerned with what Jewish people will think about him. With the exception of a small troupe of antisemitic intellectuals (who, admittedly, seem to be thick on the ground in Gawenda's circles), the main antagonists in Gawenda's story are Jewish. By contrast, most non-Jews genuinely admire the accomplishments of Jews and the Jewish people, and if there is a touch of political incorrectness about admiring Jews for being Jews, it certainly does not amount to antisemitism.

Outside academia and the press, most gentiles who give Jewishness any thought at all are respectfully mournful about the Holocaust, acutely sensitive to contemporary antisemitism, and thoroughly horrified by anti-Israel terrorism. To ordinary gentiles who are not deeply enmeshed in left-wing activism, it is crazy that Gawenda's former friend Louise Adler would have invited "eight Palestinian writers" to participate in a "truth telling" exercise at Adelaide Writers' Week, spending taxpayer money to spread the message that (in Gawenda's words) "Israel is a brutal occupier and oppressor of the Palestinians, an apartheid state, a colonialist enterprise from its birth". That's to say nothing (and Gawenda says nothing) of the liberal sprinkling of left-wing Arab-Australian truth-tellers also included on the program.

Adler is not the only Jewish antagonist in My Life as a Jew. Ostentatious Jewish unconcern with antisemitism is a theme that runs throughout the book. The two most provocative chapters of the book focus on Hannah Arendt's 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, which she famously subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil. Gawenda draws a parallel between his disappointment with Adler and the Jewish esotericist Gershom Scholem's disappointment with Arendt. Scholem was a early Zionist who, in Gawenda's words, "left Germany for Palestine in 1923, never to return". Gawenda is clearly sympathetic to Scholem and his message of "Ahavath Israel: 'Love of the Jewish people'". Once "a universalist Jew", Gawenda has aged into a Jewish particularist like Scholem. Arendt took the opposite Jewish journey, from youthful Zionism to adult universalism.

In his letters to Arendt, Scholem objected to her portrayal of Adolf Eichmann (one of the chief architects and executors of the Holocaust) as a mere bureaucrat, and even more passionately resented her implication that the Holocaust was facilitated by the cooperation of Jewish community leaders. The publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem ended the friendship between Scholem and Arendt; according to Gawenda, "for Scholem, the book is a betrayal of Arendt's people". Gawenda goes even further in his condemnation of Arendt. He calls her a "German Jewish snob", condemning her "class and ethnic snobbery, this disparagement of Jews from Eastern Europe, where the Holocaust was centrally located and where Jews had been murdered in the greatest numbers".

The reader is left to wonder whether a similar snobbery lies behind the differing Jewishness of the descendants of Western European Jews like Louise Adler and those of Eastern European Jews like Gawenda himself.

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My Life as a Jew was published on October 3, 2023—just four days before the most horrific antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. In the same Conversation review of the book in which he misrepresented Gawenda's one-sidedness, Dennis Altman observed that:

The book was written before the current war, but the horrors unleashed by the Hamas attacks of October 7 only underline the reality that without recognition of Palestinian claims Israel cannot be simultaneously Jewish and democratic.

Note the careful turn of phrase: not "the horrors of the Hamas attacks" but "the horrors unleashed by the Hamas attacks"—i.e., the horrors perpetrated by Israel. In another Conversation book review (of Left is Not Woke by Susan Neiman), Altman took a jab at Gawenda for criticising "Hannah Arendt's use of the term 'crimes against humanity' to describe the Holocaust, an expression journalist Michael Gawenda has found objectionable because it elides the particular experience of Jews". Once again, this is pure mendacity: Gawenda actually wrote that the Holocaust was both a crime against humanity and a crime against Jews, and that one does not diminish the other.

But let us never forget that the Holocaust was first and foremost a crime against Jews. The fact that the Nazis persecuted many other people alongside the Jews did not make the Holocaust a generically human tragedy. Similarly in the October 7 attacks, Jews were attacked for being Jews, not for being Israelis. They were not killed for geopolitical reasons. Whatever Hamas apologists may claim, the October 7 attacks were not part of a 'liberation struggle' undertaken by the Palestinian people. Hamas could have had no expectation of territorial gain resulting from the attacks, or an improved position in any future peace negotiations. The October 7 attacks, like their less violent support marches in Australia and other English-speaking countries, served only one purpose: to terrorise Jews.

Gawenda is not one to be terrorised, but neither is he one to actively fight back—at least, not yet. To fight back any more aggressively than he already has would run the risk of his being labeled 'right wing' by his former friends 'of the left'—a prospect that he seemingly abhors. He writes approvingly of newly (and often involuntarily) conservative Jewish writers like David Mamet, Howard Jacobson, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, and Dara Horn, but he is determined to disavow Mamet's embrace of "the populist right-wing radicalism of Donald Trump". Seemingly terrified to be associated in any way with Trumpism, Gawenda emphatically denounces Trump's "racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, and brutality, and his dislike of the Jews". This, perhaps, to excuse his own fears about drifting to 'the right'.

Ritual denunciations of Donald Trump may be par for the course on the 'left' side of politics, but they reflect particularly poorly on such a champion of "the need for journalists to be independent, open, fair, and not agenda-driven in their work" as Gawenda. Gawenda freely ridicules John Lyons and other signatories of anti-Israeli open letters for their presentation of their personal views "as facts, as incontestable truths ... [when] each one of their facts—their 'truths'—is contestable and contested". He maintains that it is absolutely "disgraceful for journalists to state as facts of truths what is open to debate and contradiction. This is the road to fake news." Yet when it comes to Donald Trump, Gawenda does exactly this. Gawenda's extravagant anti-Trumpism is just as much a shibboleth of 'the left' as Lyons' and Adler's anti-Zionism.

And Gawenda knows a thing or two about shibboleths. While apologising for being "so blunt", Gawenda states flatly that "only Jews like Louise [Adler], who sign letters like the one she signed—letters that want to silence the purveyors of 'tired narratives' about Israel and the Palestinians—could be appointed as director of Adelaide Writers' week". He might reflect that only journalists like himself who denounce Donald Trump could be appointed editor of The Age, or invited to found a journalism program at the University of Melbourne. Instead, he frets about remaining "a left-wing Jew when my comrades ... would denounce me and call me a traitor to all the good things the left stands for if they knew how I felt about Israel" while insisting that he will not "join the right-leaning army of formerly leftist Jews".

Gawenda attributes his steadfast attachment to 'the left' to his Bundist family upbringing. He seems not to have considered the possibility that the culturally Yiddish, politically anti-communist Bund, though construing itself as being 'on the left' in the context of prewar Eastern Europe, might be considered 'on the right' in the context of postmodern Australia. Other than wanting to do good in the world, it's not clear what being on 'the left' means to Gawenda. As a seasoned journalist, he should have the political maturity to understand that the leading Australian politicians of all parties have been deeply committed to doing good in the world. Would Gawenda weigh Menzies, Fraser, and Howard any lower on the moral scale than Chifley, Whitlam, and Hawke? One hopes not. But if not, then why his visceral aversion to 'the right'?

In a different era, in the lost world of prewar Polish Jewry, Gawenda's ancestors defined themselves as 'leftist', 'militantly secular', and 'anti-Zionist'. Gawenda has accepted that anti-Zionism came to mean something different after the creation of the modern state of Israel from what it had meant to his Bundist ancestors. He has also accepted that being militantly secular means something different for a Melbourne Jewish journalist than it meant for a Łódź Jewish weaver. Might he come to accept that being on 'the left' means something different when it is opposed to the 'right' of the Liberal Party of Australia than it meant when it was opposed to the 'right' of prewar Poland's authoritarian Marshal Józef Piłsudski? Gawenda claims to believe that "ideology and a commitment to an ideology are blinding"; does that apply to every ideology, or is there an exception for 'the left'?

Gawenda ultimately concludes that he "cannot imagine a Jewish world without Israel". Unless his sense of imagination changes radically in the near future, he will have to imagine a leftist Australia without Gawenda. Ninety years ago, being leftist in Łódź may have meant being anti-Zionist. Today, being leftist in Melbourne means being antisemitic. Gawenda can either accept that antisemitism is a core tenet of the Australian left, or move to what he disparagingly calls 'the right'. If he does make the move, he might discover that 'the right' is more sensible and welcoming than he thinks.

The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return — tomorrow!