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A couple of years later, after America had entered the war, Germany agreed to an armistice—an end to the fighting—on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which seemed to offer a fair peace without a victory for either side. But this turned out to be a bait-and-switch operation, since once Germany had withdrawn its army from French territory and given up its powerful naval forces, the Allies then imposed a brutal starvation blockade upon the weakened country, inflicting many hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths until the new German government finally accepted very harsh peace terms. These included the dismemberment and occupation of portions of their country, permanent military weakness, and acceptance of the entire guilt of the war, as well as paying gigantic future financial reparations to the victorious Allies. The outrageous terms imposed at Versailles deeply rankled all Germans, and the memory of the starvation imposed upon Germany during the war and even afterward was one of the reasons Hitler believed it was so important to somehow gain access to additional agricultural territory. ... Writing before the “official version” of historical events had been rigidly determined, Bryant describes Germany’s very difficult domestic situation between the two world wars, its problematic relationship with its tiny Jewish minority, and the circumstances behind the rise of Hitler, providing a very different perspective on these important events than what we usually read in our standard textbooks. Among other surprising facts, he notes that although Jews were just 1% of the total population, even five years after Hitler had come to power and implemented various anti-Semitic policies, they still apparently owned “something like a third of the real property” in that country, with the great bulk of these vast holdings having been acquired from desperate, starving Germans in the terrible years of the early 1920s. Thus, much of Germany’s 99% German population had recently been dispossessed of the assets they had built up over generations… Bryant also candidly notes the enormous Jewish presence in the leadership of the Communist movements that had temporarily seized power after World War I, both in major portions of Germany and in nearby Hungary. This was an ominous parallel to the overwhelmingly Jewish Bolsheviks who had gained control of Russia and then butchered or expelled that country’s traditional Russian and German ruling elites, and therefore a major source of Nazi fears.

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The Founders and the Constitution, Part 5: Edmund Randolph [https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-founders-and-the-constitution-part-5-edmund-randolph_5192793.html]()

_‘No day goes’, the chronicler Shihabuddin al-Umari recorded during Alauddin Khalji’s rule from 1296-1316, ‘without the sale of thousands of slaves.’_ Flags covered the skies, and drums thundered as they would on a tiger hunt as the army of the Arakan marched into the jungles, great ranks of infantry backed by hundreds of battle elephants. Tens of thousands of boats stood by, to help the army jump over the dense veins of rivers that separated the mountains from the plains. King Sirisudhammaraja—“the very image of virtue, and in prowess, like the morning sun,” gushed a court chronicler—was hunting for human prey. This weekend, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands formally apologised for the role of the Orange-Nassau dynasty in enabling the slave trade. The Dutch East India Company slave traders, the King said, had turned individuals into commodities, a kind of oppression that is “the most hurtful, the most humiliating, the most degrading.” Earlier this year, a historical investigation commissioned by the Dutch parliament showed that the royal house had directly earned at least €500 million from the slave trade in modern currency. Like so many painful colonial memories, the story of the Indian Ocean slave trade—which saw Indians being trafficked from Malabar, the Coromandel coast and Bengal to the Dutch East India Company outpost at Batavia, in Indonesia—has been obliterated from our memories. King Willem-Alexander’s apology should push India to honour the victims. **The Indian slave trade** Even though Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar had ordered the Mughal empire’s slaves to be set free in 1582—centuries before the United Kingdom followed suit in 1838—trafficking in humans continued. Tens of thousands of enslaved Indians continued to be purchased by the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company, kidnapped from Bengal and the Coromandel coast by pirates, mercenaries, and the Taung-gnu rulers of Arakan. The historian Markus Vink has shown the Indian Ocean slave trade relied on three interlocking circles of trafficking—an African circuit, running from the East African coast to Madagascar and Mauritius; a middle circuit, running from Malabar to the Coromandel and Bengal; and a Southeast Asian circuit drawing on Malaysia, Indonesia, Irian Jaya, and the southern Philippines. From the work of historian Ishrat Amin, among the few chroniclers of the Indian Ocean slave trade, we gain a sense of the savagery it involved. After the Arakan king’s successful raid on Bengal in 1624, the Dutch East India Company had despatched the frigates Jager and Muys, along with the yacht Meden Blicque, to purchase at least 1,0000 or the 10,000 captives who were reputed to have been taken. The bulk of the slaves, though, had died in an epidemic during their forced march, and just 93 were available for sale. In 1643, Dutch East India Company chief merchant Aren Van Del Helm obtained a licence from the Arakan king, allowing freedom to purchase gum, indigo, white cotton cloth, rice and human beings. That year, the Company bought 600 slaves, out of which 135 died of smallpox on their way to Batavia. The same year, Dutch East India Company ships trawled the Cochin coast, looking for slaves captured in the war in Bijapur. Following devastating wars and famine in Nagapattanam in 1660, the crews of the Walvis Bay and Ulisses were able to find hundreds of enslaved people for sale. Later in the century, rates were fixed: men aged 20 to 36 sold for 12½ rials, women from 12 to 25 for 8 rials, boys from 8 to 19 for 7½ rials, girls from 7-12 for 6 rials, and smaller children for 3½ rials. Even younger children were accepted, but without payment, because of the high mortality rates. The price of an adult male slave was about a third of that of a ton of rice.

There was a bomb-drop silence in the Praja Sabha. All Trivandrum was gripped with tension as the demand for temple entry reached a fever pitch. When T.K. Madhavan got up to speak, the hearts of the more nervous members beat in their chests. The Ezhava poet, Mooloor S. Padmanabha Panicker, tactically found himself a seat at the very back of the chamber. As it turned out, Madhavan didn’t throw a bomb, but spoke forcefully for an hour and a quarter, recalls his colleague N. Kumaran, who was there. But the fear of violence would hang over the movement before, during, and after the Vaikom Satyagraha, although the volunteers never deviated from their Gandhian approach. On one occasion, it triggered a misunderstanding between Mahatma Gandhi and Narayana Guru. In March 1924, satyagrahis began to flock to Vaikom in the princely state of Travancore, to agitate for the public roads near the town’s Mahadeva Temple to be thrown open to avarnas, or ‘untouchables’. They came from across Kerala and far beyond; famously, a group of Sikhs arrived from Amritsar and set up a kitchen to feed the satyagrahis. To call the movement secular, though, would be misleading: Gandhi insisted that it be a Hindu affair, and alienated the Christians. A theocratic state — its 18th-century founder, Marthanda Varma, had gifted the kingdom to the god Padmanabha, and his successors ruled as the deity’s pious servants, Padmanabha Dasa — too, made its preparations. The contested roads were put under heavy guard — the district magistrate said he wanted to prevent clashes between the satyagrahis and angry orthodox Hindus — while cases and arrest warrants appeared out of the blue against the satyagraha’s leaders, wrote K.G. Narayanan in his book Ezhava-Thiyya Charithrapathanam. The establishment had no lack of cheerleaders: “Ezhavas should be given, not temple entry, but adi (blows),” brayed one newspaper. In any case, temple entry was still a ways off, and the movement’s immediate results were limited. The aftermath, and the tortuous path to the eventual Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936, are subject to debate. The second in a two-part series, this article looks at what happened over the course of the Vaikom Satyagraha from March 1924 to November 1925, and what its fallout was. On 30 March 1924, three men — an ‘upper-caste’ Nair, an Ezhava and a Dalit Pulaya — “dressed in khaddar uniforms and garlanded”, and followed by a crowd of “thousands” tried to use the roads. The three were arrested and sentenced to six months in prison when they refused to furnish bonds for good behaviour. In a 1976 paper (Temple-Entry Movement in Travancore, 1860-1940), scholar Robin Jeffrey identifies five stages in the long campaign that followed. The initial phase saw a daily “ritual of satyagraha and arrest” that continued until 10 April, when the government decided to cease making arrests. The next few months saw the police barricade the roads against the satyagrahis, who sat in front of the barricades, fasted and sang patriotic songs — and suffered attacks from “thugs” dispatched by caste Hindus. This was also the period when national leaders such as C. Rajagopalachari and E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar) visited and offered advice to the volunteers. But this wasn’t the first time Periyar, who would be arrested twice during the campaign, was associated with the anti-caste movement in Kerala. Just the previous year, he’d been involved in an incident that exposed some of the ideological cleavages among the Ezhavas. At a meeting in Kottayam, Madan Mohan Malaviya — visiting Travancore on Madhavan’s invitation — had exhorted his audience to chant ‘Ramaya namah’. Led by Periyar and the atheist leader Sahodaran Ayyappan, many responded with precisely the opposite: ‘Ravanaya namah’. Nevertheless, Periyar came together with Madhavan and other ideological rivals to play a noted role in the Vaikom Satyagraha, which entered its third stage after the death of one of its most intractable foes, Maharaja Moolam Thirunal Rama Varma, in August. His successor, Chithira Thirunal Balarama Varma, was a boy, and power passed into the hands of a regent: Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi. The regent immediately released the 19 satyagrahis who had been jailed in April, while the campaign continued much as before. But now, the attention was on two jathas (marches) of caste Hindus that traversed the state in support of the movement — a triumph for Madhavan’s policy of allying with the dominant castes. A resolution calling for the opening of roads around temples was also introduced in Travancore’s legislature on 25 October 1924, and was defeated by a single vote. The fourth phase began with Gandhi’s visit to the state in March 1925. He spoke to all parties but was only able to get the police to withdraw their barricades — in exchange for the satyagrahis promising not to enter the forbidden zones. The final stage was a period of “waning interest” that lasted until November 1925, writes Jeffrey. By this point, the government had completed alternative roads near the temple that were open to the avarnas, while a few lanes remained closed to them. The last satyagrahi was withdrawn on 23 November.