After Such Knowledge

I think it's fair to say that Czarist Russia was turning into a Universal State that the revolution narrowly avoided, and that the Soviet Union after this entered one of those "capital accumulation" stages which then invested this capital in industrialization to start a new s-curve, a Kroeberian reconstitution. A really elegant way to reinterpret the 19th–20th century Russian arc. Late‑imperial Russia had many of the symptoms: - A vast, overextended empire trying to hold together dozens of ethnicities through coercive integration. - A Dominant Minority (the landed aristocracy + autocracy) blocking reform and sabotaging productive modernization. - A militarized bureaucracy increasingly substituting for genuine social cohesion. - A legitimacy crisis where the old ideology (Orthodoxy–Autocracy–Nationality) no longer mobilized the population. - Attempts at “static unity” — Russification, secret police, censorship — classic Universal State behavior. But here’s the twist:  That...

  When Krishnamurti and some of his friends first heard that "Gandhiji has been shot dead!," the first question that one of them asked was: "Was it a Muslim or a Hindu that shot him?" The riots would have been even more extensive and violent if it had been a Muslim so, if it had been a Muslim, would it have been right to withhold that information? We can think of many situations where the truth would be a problem. It's hard to tell why Gandhi's kumbaya failed and Nehru's capital-intensive policy won unless this was due to outside interference by the equally kumbaya Brit upper-class twits' miscalculation about unifying Hindu with Muslim in governance. Both of these ethnic groups only became more suspicious of each other. They ought to have united in their mutual suspicion of the Brits and repelled them. If Clio exists, then her opinion might not advocate non‑violent resistance as a primary engine of historical change, but would she recognize that such...