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There is no simple clear cut answer to this is going to be a long one. Our problems long began before CPEC and CPEC has little to do with what’s fundamentally wrong with the Pakistani economy.First, the state of the economy:When asked about worsening fiscal position where the deficit escalated to 8.9 percent of GDP for last fiscal year, the government said that out of total collected tax revenue of Rs3.8 trillion, debt servicing consumed Rs2.1 trillion and then after providing share to provinces, the government had to borrow to meet defence, development and running of the government expenditure.A comparison of macro-indicators at end fiscal year 2018 with FY 2019 suggests that there has been a fast track deterioration of the economic situation during the last one year of the PTI rule.The following are the key indicators showing how things have gone wrong with the Pakistan’s economy.- GDP growth was recorded at 5.8 percent in 2018. As a result of slowdown in economy, growth rate for 2019 is expected to be 3 percent or even less.- Fiscal deficit has increased to Rs3.4 trillion at the end of June 2019 compared to Rs2.2 trillion when PML-N government left in June 2018. Amount wise this is the largest ever deficit in our history. In terms of percentage, fiscal deficit has been recorded at 8.9 percent compared to 6.6 percent on June end 2018. As percentage of GDP, 8.9 percent is the highest in last 30 years and 8.9 percent also has to be seen against PTI’s own set target of 5.1 percent in September last year. Missing the target by miles reflect complete lack of understanding on the part of PTI’s economic team. The high fiscal deficit has a direct consequence on the amount of borrowing as the following debt numbers will reflect.- Total debt and liabilities on the end of June 2018 was Rs30 trillion, which has now gone up to Rs40 trillion. This is the largest ever increase in debt and liabilities in one year. Pakistan’s total debt and liabilities in first 71 years was Rs30 trillion but under PTI government, one third more has been accumulated. This is unprecedented and reflects poor management of expenditure and revenue. If the trend continues like this, it is feared, the whole economic structure would collapse as our economy will not be able to sustain this.- Tax revenue was at a record level at more than Rs3,800 billion in 2018. First time in Pakistan history, tax revenue didn’t register any increase during 2019. During PML-N Government’s five years, the tax revenue increased 20 percent per annum in 4 out of 5 years. This was in spite of extremely low inflation and without significant devaluation - the two factors that automatically help increase tax revenues. It is said that the current revenue target of Rs5,550 billion seems very difficult to be achieved. It’s about 44 percent higher than the last year’s actual collection.- Inflation was at a record low at 3.9 percent in 2018. Last inflation figure reported by the present government is 10.3 percent.- SBP policy (interest) rate was 6.50 percent in mid-2018. It has been to 13.25 percent by the PTI government.- Stock Market was 42,847 at end PML-N government. It’s now hovering around 30,000 after touching 28,000.- Foreign exchange reserves were $15,913 million (SBP reserves $9,510 million) at end of PML-N government. Now it’s $15,630 (SBP reserves $8,271 million). This is in spite of around $12 billion obtained from friendly countries and IMF in last one year.- The only positive thing happened during the last one year is that the current account deficit which improved during PTI government. It was $19,897 million (6.3 percent of GDP) during 2018 fiscal year. It’s now $13,508 million (4.8 percent of GDP) in 2019. It’s ideal to reduce current account deficit by increasing exports. That has the best impact on the economy. The government, however, did it without increasing exports but due to reduction in imports. It is said that the policy to impact imports has considerably slowed down the economy.- Compared to GDP of $313 billion in 2018, our GDP has come down to $280 billion - a reduction of $33 billion only to achieve reduction of $4 billion in imports.- As a result of GDP decline, per capita GDP has gone down by more than 8 percent.- Large scale manufacturing has had negative growth during last one year.- Agriculture growth was less than 1 percent.- Massive currency devaluation took place with rupee going from 116 by end of PML-N government to around 160. This is the largest devaluation in last several decades with significant downside impact on our economy.- FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) has plummeted and is down by more than 50 percent.- As a result of significant reduction in growth and high inflation, the common Pakistani has been the worst affected. In last one year, more than 45 lac people have gone below the poverty line. In addition more than 15 lac people have lost their jobs.According to official projections, the GDP growth is expected to be around 2.4 percent while inflation will be in the range of 13 percent to 15 percent. The discount rate is expected to go further up in the range of 15 percent-16 percent.As a result, during the present fiscal year about five million people will go below the poverty line. This is on top of 4.5 million people who suffered this misery past one year. With declining growth rate, another 1.5 million or more Pakistanis will become unemployed.In the first two years of PTI rule, it is feared that about three million Pakistanis will become unemployed as against the party’s commitment of providing 10 million jobs over five years.Economic situation going from bad to worseThe Executive Summary is as follows:The debt crises of Pakistan began long before CPEC was even conceptualized. Pakistan currently is in the intial stages of a debt trap but to say it’s because of CPEC is a bad application of the correlation equaling causation fallacy.Pakistan’’s debt trap is due to its incredible inefficient and badly thought out government spending which is directed more towards plugging in leakages in it’s projects and public sector enterprises rather than meaningful investments for growth that lead to a high ROI in the future. Along with a non existent tax base that is actually shrinking even further.Lets go over the timeline first:Source: Pakistan’s Public debtSource: Pakistan’s Public debtThe following are the key insights to take away from this:CPEC was formally announced in April 2015. But Pakistan’s debt problem began in the 2007–2009 period, long before CPEC was announced.The primary cause of Pakistan’s debt is domestic debt rather than external debt. This is telling for a few reasons: External debt is normally tied to development projects. So a high external debt means that the country is borrowing loans from abroad to fund domestic development projects that spur growth and have good ROIs in the future that our coming generations can take advantage of.However, our external debt profile has not changed much. It’s our domestic debt that has sky rocketed. Domestic debt is tied closely to the government meeting it’s fiscal deficits or current expenditures. That is, the government is borrowing money from local banks or printing its own money just to meet it’s day to day expenditure.It’s ok for governments to take loans from abroad to fund major development projects and then pass on the debt for those projects to future generations as they will reap the harvest and return for those projects and it will lead to a betterment in their lives.If I borrow money today to buy a car for my son, I can make the payments for it as long as i live and then pass on the remaining to my son since he can take advantage of the car as well.But if i borrow money to pay for my booze and cigarettes and then pass on the debt i incurred for those to my son, I have curtailed his spending power in the future without passing on any meaningful betterment in his life in the future.That’s unfortunately what the Pakistan government has been doing: Borrowing from local banks to finance its day to day expenditures.Actually, we are currently borrowing to fund our entire defense, development and government administrative expenditures after paying back our debt obligations and our shares to the provinces.This has crowded out the private sector from bank capital for loans in order to grow their business as the banks would prefer to lend to the government as a safer bet. So the private sector growth has slowed leading to a lower tax revenue from businesses.Imran Khan has always been quite vocal about how Pakistan’s main problem is corruption, people not paying taxes and wealth stashed abroad. $200 billion stashed abroad in Swiss banks, which when bought back could be used to pay off our debt. Apparently the figure has been revised down to $12.5 billion and even that has not been bough back.As far as taxes go, the government keeps coming up with stats like “If every Pakistani paid 1000 rupees we could do blah blah blah”. Has Mr. Khan ever toured the rural countries from his Bani Gala residence? Nearly half of our population is below the age of 18 and earning below $2 a day. Where exactly are they supposed to scrounge up the money.Corruption then gets dragged in. I can honestly say anti-corruption drives in Pakistan and “Accountability” is used more as a political tool to keep civilian elected politicians in line more than anything. The Judiciary and Military and Civil service seem surprisingly immune from them.Also, Pakistan ranks on the same level of corruption as Vietnam which is growing at a rate of 6.8% and destined for a new Asian tiger ranking.The problem in Pakistan is legalized corruption: Where the law permits expenditures that the state has no business indulging in.An officers mess hall spending lakhs of rupees to upgrade the air conditioning of their living room and another few lakhs to maintain a pretty lawn outisde, it’s not considered corruption in Pakistan. But it is a waste.When the Director of some third rate government insitution gets a free fuel, a driver, a car, a house and perks and privileges in his formalized salary and work benefits, it’s not corruption. But it is a waste.We’ve restricted our scope to corruption because the idea of Zardari getting a 10% cut on a submarine deal or Sheikh Rashid accepting money bribes under the table inflames our passions. But most of the corruption in Pakistan doesn’t happen like that. Most of the corruption in Pakistan wouldn’t even be considered corruption.Its in the forms of perks, benefits, cars, drivers, petrol subsidies, free housing and countless other benefits distributed among elites and their networks of patronage which encompass millions of supporters for different political factions and entities.When the government distributes massive amounts of funds for discretionary spending by parliamentarians in their districts and said funds are spent on schools with no teachers, roads with no bidding and other pointless activities designed more to distribute resources among followers than actual growth, i have to ask if a poor country like ours can afford this.Pakistan’s problem isn’t a low tax base or corruption. It’s systemic waste. Legalized waste. Of precious tax payer money.On SOEs that run into billions of rupees in losses. On development projects that are offer no clear return on investments. Ghost schools. Inflated and bloated state organizations and their salaries. And countless other forms of legalized waste.Pakistan’s government institutions are often classified as “rent seeking” for a reason: they are still mired in the colonial era structures left behind by the British. The state was designed by the British colonialists to extract resources for the industrialization of England, to purchase the loyalty of local clan chiefs and tribal leaders who were loyal to the crown and to enable the aristocratic lifestyles of the ruling elite.We have barely gone beyond that way of thinking and the state currently continues to perpetuate it’s rent seeking strategy with long term economic plans being developed but continuously disrupted by political turmoil.And the political turmoil itself also bears discussion: The establishment would always prefer a weak parliament where no party has a strong majority so that civilian officials are unable to surmount a challenge to the unelected establishment.Unfortunately, weak civilian governments make weak economic policies since they are unable to gather the political will needed for tough economic measures. Especially when establishment agents are lurking around the corner to sponsor protests that cut civil leaders down to size.The military dictatorships often don’t fare much better either. While benefiting from massive amounts of US military and civil aid, their economic policies are not superior to the civilians despite protestations to the contrary.Actually, if you look at it from the data centric viewpoint, the PPP was actually the government from the 2000 to present day period that performed best in terms of boosting exports, and that too in a tough global environment during the 2008–2009 recession era.Which political party has been the best for Pakistan's economy? Trade stats reveal allOne of the core problems causing the debt crises in Pakistan is the current account deficit where imports have outstripped exports resulting in pressure on Pakistan’s dollar reserves when servicing foreign payments and debt obligations. Growing exports are a vital way to resolve this issue and to manage debt levels. Note that Pakistan’s current account deficit began during the Musharraf era and got carried on from there.Even if the trade deficit is growing, this is not necessarily a bad thing if the deficit is because of development related activities where machinery and infrastructure is being imported instead of luxury items like bulletproof BMWs (which the government imported massive quantities of). Countries like Turkey also have significant trade deficits but their trade deficits are due to productive imports that boost local economic growth.Also, the way that Pakistan has tried to reduce the current account defecit in terms of trade has been through constant currency devaluations in order to make exports more competitive. This policy has been consistently failing for a decade. Pakistan’s exports are noncompetitive because we have some of the highest electricity rates for our textile factories and other businesses. And we have failed to invest enough in small technology firms that could have made a niche out for themselves as businesses that dont require much upfront capital investment but offer immense revenues in dollar denominated currencies.Pakistan’s largest resource pool right now is its young population and if we properly trained and educated even a fraction of them and helped them set up local companies or exported them as talented man power, we could boost our exports enormously. Right now our primary foreign exchange is coming in the form of remittances.But instead we keep devaluing the currency and manage to increase maybe $500 million to $1 billion increase in exports and 3–4 billion USD decrease in imports?While inflating our debt obligations by almost 40–50%, shaving $30–35 billion USD off of our economy, choking imports and reducing economic activity to a low 2–3%?For $4 billion in account deficit reduction?In any case, growing exports won’t do much when they are matched with increasing borrowing from local banks due to high government expenditures that are mostly to cover for massive losses from 5 key elements:The five real fault-lines in the rupee-based economy are:the Rs1.7 trillion circular debtRs1.6 trillion leakages in Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs)trillion-rupee leakages in public procurement projects$2 billion leakage in the gas sectorThe Rs734 billion debt in the government’s commodity operations.These are the five sectors that need wholesale reforms. And, these are the five serious fault-lines where our reform basket is absolutely empty (resulting in the skyrocketing of our debt to Rs40 trillion).Source: ContinuityThere is no point in talking about increasing the tax base when these massive leakages in government revenue exist. It’s akin to pouring water in a jug with a hole at the bottom.Imran Khan has looked at the yawning deficits and declared austerity on the solution to our problems.Government expenditures are being slashed, the monetary policy tightened and more taxes being imposed.Thing about the tax revenue increase programs this past decade is is that they always have the same story: Government announces new tax, agriculture and retail push back, the government withdraws the tax plan and tries to squeeze out more taxes from the current, already squeezed small tax base. This leads to current tax payers start to find ways to avoid taxes and leads to tax base actually shrinking.Which is whats happening right now.Also, the imposition of taxes on retail sector has been done in the worst way possible: Indirect taxation, which is always just passed on to the end user and leads to sky rocketing inflation while eating into the already tiny margins of retailers like street vendors.Tell me: What exactly is the point of maintaining humongous tax drains like the Federal Bureau of revenue when they are incapable of collecting taxes directly from tax payers?And in some places, we area actually spending Rs 1000 to collect Rs. 100 in tax…The failure to develop an adequate tax base combined with incredibly wasteful government expenditures is at the heart of our current economic crises, not CPEC.The tendency to blame China for Pakistan’s debt problems is an angle pushed far more from Washington, New Delhi and Tokyo than anywhere else simply because that narrative suits their strategic interests.And while the irony of the Indian government excusing Pakistan’s poor economic management causing debt to blame China instead is not lost on me, it’s simply not true.As the Pakistani public is well aware of by now, crisis interventions by outside donors are no more than a stopgap solution to what has become a chronic problem: Pakistan, for all intents and purposes, does not have a tax base. Only about 1 percent of the population pays income tax. According to an IMF working paper authored by Serhan Cevik in 2016, Pakistan had a “tax revenue gap” equivalent to 10 percent of national GDP (or roughly $28 billion in 2016) and could potentially double its tax revenue-to-GDP ratio.While not even high-income countries manage to collect the full total of their potential tax revenues, the paper pointed out that Pakistan’s collection rate falls “significantly below” even countries of comparable circumstances. Not much has changed in the last two years. Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue confessed this past June that it would miss its original revenue collection target for the 2017-2018 fiscal year by 162 billion rupees ($1.32 billion).Until it builds an adequate tax base, Pakistan’s fiscal stability will continue to rely on outside donors. In other words: there won’t be any fiscal stability.Wanted: A Solid Tax Base in PakistanIn any case, the only thing Imran Khan has done is to impost MORE taxes on the already burdened tax base which is small enough as it is. And the reaction to that has been current tax payers taking their money abroad or finding ways to hide it because even they have reached their breaking point.Meanwhile vast swathes of the underground economy remain untaxed. Indirect taxation continues to be favored over direct taxation. Small businesses are seeing their already small margins shrink.And the end result of this sad story is that the FBR has recorded its lowest recent revenue collection in the near past. And our tax base, small as it is, is actually declining now.The Catastrophe of the IMFI could not have said anything better than what has been said by Mr. Abdul Sattar in his incredible take down of the disaster that has been the IMF and it’s economic policies. The IMF is a rapacious institution run to serve imperialist resource extraction projects across the globe and to think the IMF and it’s packages are solution to our problems is a folly beyond imagining. And the dark past of the IMF’s “austerity” mantra has a long track record of wrecking developing world economies.Long but worthy read:The US's voting share in in the IMF is 17.16 percent and in the World Bank 16.41 percent. Japan holds the next highest voting shares with 6.27 percent and 7.87 percent respectively. Washington also has the unique privilege of appointing the president of the World Bank and is the only country entitled to a permanent place among the Bank’s executive directors.So, it is no surprise that these institutions were employed as a tool to serve the interests of the global hegemon, punishing states that dared to challenge the rapaciousness of Western capitalism. For instance Salvador Allende, the first elected socialist leader of Chile, infuriated the US and its Western allies by asserting that his country should take care of its own natural resources and run the economy. This did not go down well with the arrogant modern imperial powers that are then said to have forced the World Bank to stop giving loans to the elected government in 1972, triggering an economic chaos that culminated in a military coup. Soon after the coup, the doors were opened for military dictator General Pinochet, whose brutal regime not only assassinated Allende but also decimated up to 130,000 Chileans in a 17-year despotic rule. The World Bank showered $350.5 million between on Chile 1973 and 1976, almost 13 times the $27.7 million it gave during the three-year Allende presidency.Integration of the developing countries' economies was also one of the main purposes of these institutions. To achieve this, they came up with the idea of the Structural Adjustment Programme that sought to pressure the Third World countries into privatizing industries and the service sector, cutting in government spending, liberalizing capital markets (which leads to unstable trading in currencies), promoting market-based pricing (which tends to raise the cost of basic goods) and raising interest rates.The World Bank instituted its SAPs in 1980 and the IMF imposed them in 1986. According to a research paper by Asad Sami, during 1980-93, 70 developing countries were subjected to 566 stabilization and structural adjustment programmes – with disastrous consequences. The author claims that between 1984 and 1990, Third World countries under SAPs transferred $178 billion to Western commercial banks. The enormous capital drain prompted Morris Miller, a Canadian former World Bank director, to remark, “Not since the Conquistadors plundered Latin America has the world experienced such a flow in the direction we see today." Such policies led to the stagnation of growth in developing countries besides doubling their debt burden to over $1.5 trillion by the end of the 1980s, doubling again to $3 trillion by the end of the 1990s.The ruling elite of the Western capitalist world ruthlessly exploited the developing countries, especially those of Latin America and Africa. To understand how such policies ruined the lives of millions across the world, one needs to see what happened in Peru, Mexico and other parts of the globe. In 1990, an IMF-sponsored stabilization package produced catastrophic consequences in Peru. Within no time fuel prices increased 31 times – by 2,968 percent – and that of bread 12 times – by 1,150 percent. The prices of most basic food staples increased by six or seven times – 446 percent in a single month – yet wages had already been compressed by 80 percent in the period prior to the adoption of these measures in August 1990. IMF SAPs were first imposed on Mexico in 1982 and by 1992 infant deaths due to malnutrition tripled, the minimum wage fell by 60 percent and the percentage of the population living in poverty rose from less than half to more than two-thirds.Such policies also hit Africa. The situation of the continent was not rosy prior to the arrival of the international monetary institutions in 1980 but even then during 1960-1980, Sub Saharan Africa’s GDP per capita grew by 36 percent. Between the 1980s and 2000s, it actually fell by 15 percent. Dictation by the international monetary institutions led to the rise of rampant poverty and by 2015, 413 million people were living on less than $1.90 a day. Despite following these anti-people policies, the average life expectancy for Sub Saharan Africa is only 47 years (the lowest in the world), a drop of 15 years since 1980. Forty percent of the population suffers from malnutrition that causes low birth weight among infants and stunts growth in children.Advocates of a free market economy could brag about the increasing trade that the mineral rich continent witnessed from 1989 to 1999. It is estimated that Sub Saharan Africa’s trade as a percentage of GDP (a key indicator of globalization) increased from 78.1 percent to 95.6 percent; in dollar terms, trade grew from $175 billion in 1990 to $187 billion in 1999; for the same period, foreign direct investment jumped from $923 million to $7.9 billion in 1999.But contrary to the tall claims of international monetary institutions, export expansion and rising foreign investment in Africa neither increased growth nor reduced poverty or debt. In reality, most African exports are raw materials, and non-oil commodity prices dropped by 35 percent on average from 1997 and 2004. Tax holidays and profit repatriation might have helped foreign companies to accumulate immense wealth but made very little difference to the lives of millions of Africans.Per capita income, one of the tools to measures the development of a country, also fell between 1980 – when SAPs were imposed on 36 of Sub-Saharan Africa’s 47 countries – and 2004. It fell for most Sub Saharan countries by 25 percent during the 1980s and for 18 countries these incomes were lower in 1999 than in 1975. In 1960, Sub-Saharan Africa’s per capita income was about one-ninth of that in high-income OECD countries; by 1998, it had deteriorated dramatically to about 1/18.Africa’s external debt has increased by more than 500 percent since 1980, to $417 billion in 2017. SAPs have transferred more than $229 billion in debt payments from Sub-Saharan Africa to the West since 1980. Africa spends four times more on debt interest payments than on healthcare. This combined with cutbacks in social expenditure caused healthcare spending in the 42 poorest African countries to fall by 50 percent during the 1980s. More than 200 million Africans have no access to health services as hundreds of clinics, hospitals and medical facilities have been closed.The catastrophic impacts of the policies imposed by international monetary institutions were not confined to Africa and Latin America, as discussed in the first part of this article; they also played havoc with the lives of millions in Asia and other parts of the world as well. In Asia, the IMF and the World Bank first encouraged financial liberalization that partly led to the financial crisis in South East Asia during the decade of the 1990s, and they then prescribed a disastrous recipe to address this crisis.Several experts believe that the crisis was caused in large part by South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia's heavy reliance on short-term foreign loans and openness to hot money. When it became apparent in 1997 that private enterprises would not be able to meet their payment obligations, international currency markets panicked and Asian currencies plummeted. What they forget to mention is the ideology of international monetary institutions that encourage the reliance of countries on short-term foreign loans and openness to hot money which help speculators fulfill their gargantuan appetite for profit and money.After pushing these countries towards a crisis, the IMF treated the Asian meltdown like other emergency situations, giving assistance only in exchange for structural adjustment policies, which was totally unnecessary because these states were not facing a budgetary deficit issue. Nonetheless, the fund instructed governments to cut spending, which deepened the economic slowdown. In South Korea, for example, a country whose income approached European levels, unemployment skyrocketed from approximately 3 percent to 10 percent. 'IMF suicides' became common among workers who had lost their jobs and dignity.In Indonesia, the worst-hit country, poverty rates rose from an official level of 11 percent before the crisis to 40-60 percent, and GDP declined by 15 percent in one year. Malaysia stood out as a country that refused IMF assistance and advice. Instead of further opening its economy, Malaysia imposed capital controls, in an effort to eliminate speculative trading in its currency. While the IMF mocked this approach when adopted, the Fund later admitted that it succeeded.The IMF recipe proved to be very disastrous for the common Indonesian who greatly suffered because of the policies imposed by the global financial body. Prior to the 1997-98 financial crisis, Indonesia had a relatively comfortable debt situation. The government borrowed primarily from the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and a group of bilateral donors grouped in the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI), for funding its development budget. Jakarta approached IMF in 1997 for a $43 billion bailout and within a few years, the bailout turned out to be a great curse for the masses, adding to their miseries and making their lives difficult. In January 2003, the government of the then president Megawati Soekarnoputri raised the prices on fuel (22 percent), telephone (15 percent) and electricity (6 percent). This was happening in a country where inflation was 10 percent in 2002 and more than half of the country's 220 million population lived on less than $2 a day and burdened with more than 40 million unemployed souls.To tide over the crisis, it was suggested that Indonesia should take specific steps to liberalise trade and investment which included: reducing tariffs on all imported food products to five percent and cutting non-agricultural tariffs to 10 percent by 2003; opening banks to foreign ownership by June 1998; and lifting restrictions on foreign banks by February 1998. Despite taking these drastic measures, the country's financial woes did not decrease. The official debt burden increased from 27 percent of GDP prior to the crisis to more than 100 percent by the end of 1999, before declining gradually. In fact Indonesia, which was ranked as middle-income and middle-indebted before the crisis (at the same level as its neighbours, Thailand and the Philippines), came to be ranked as belonging to the SILIC (severely indebted low income countries) category.Such reckless policies also contributed to the immiserating of the people in the Philippines where the government kept domestic wages low at the behest of the international financial bodies. This badly affected the marginalized sectors of society, forcing 54 percent of the population to live in absolute poverty while the government debt service was eating up 50 percent of the national budget.This was the brief history of the disastrous impacts caused by the policies of the global financial institutions. It is difficult to imagine why we still insist on going to such institutions. The policies of international monetary institutions clearly indicate that they seek to benefit the Global North. Their agenda is to facilitate the plundering of third-world countries by the advanced capitalist states. Their mission is not opaque. Their purpose is not mysterious. They are very vocal in making it clear that the Structural Adjustment Programmes are meant to promote the free market. They want developing countries, including Pakistan, to reduce import restrictions, work for the advancement of exports, carry out the privatization of public industries, control wages and leave the social sector at the mercy of market forces.Which of these points could help the economy? Let us begin with privatization. The mantra of selling state concerns was used to convince people that it would help the country repay loans. We started the process of privatization in the 1980s, which gathered pace after the restoration of democracy in 1988. According to the finance ministry our total debt and external liabilities was $20.90 billion in 1990, rising to $38.86 billion in 2007 and $99.1 billion now. We have sold out more than 160 state-run entities since the 1980s, rendering hundreds and thousands of people jobless. Instead of seeing the country free from debt, what we see today is nothing but a phenomenal surge in our external debt and liabilities which is likely to haunt our coming generations for decades or maybe centuries.Did these much-vaunted reforms at the behest of international monetary institutions bring any positive change in the lives of millions of Pakistanis? The answer is not difficult to imagine. While the World Bank claims poverty has been reduced, asserting it fell to 29.5 percent in 2014 from 64.3 percent in 2002, Pakistan’s first ever official report on multidimensional poverty, launched by the PML-N government in 2016, says nearly 39 percent of Pakistanis live in multidimensional poverty. The other social development indicators that were meant to be visible after the economic reforms seem to be nowhere either. The country houses more than 25 million out-of-school children. More than 40 percent of children are stunted. Infant mortality rate was 63.3 deaths per thousand live births in 2018. Eighty percent of diseases are caused by contaminated water which is a rare commodity for the majority of the poor, and Hepatitis has become an epidemic in several parts of the country.Since the arrival of the Tabdeeli Sarkar, inflation has skyrocketed. The prices of petrol and gas have witnessed a phenomenal surge. The champions of employment creation are planning to render tens of thousands workers jobless by privatizing state-run concerns. Given all this, it is more likely that the prescription of the IMF will further add to the miseries. Therefore, it is important that we think of the alternatives. Following the IMF's dictation will do no good. If the advisers of Zardari, Nawaz and Imran are unanimous in seeking help from global financial bodies then the people must realise that they just want to draw to hefty salaries from the public exchequer but want workers' wages to be stagnated. They want to see austerity in the lives of millions of people but would love to stay in five-star hotels and make expensive foreign trips from the taxes of common people. It is time we came up with our own alternative.Source #1 :Is the IMF the cure?Source #2: Is the IMF the cure?We have been under IMF led programs for decades. They said privatize industries, we privatized nearly 160 industries since the 1980s and yet our debt levels have gone up rather than down. We have devalued a currency to the point that it’s 160 rupees to a dollar now, yet our exports are meager while our debt obligations and economic size has shrunk.We shouldn’t blame the IMF: We should blame ourselves. The IMF was never set up to help us. Their macro stabilization programs have had mixed successes and are a generalized template solution that doesn’t take into account region or country specific condition. They apply one size fits all solutions to countries as diverse as Laos, El Salvador. Egypt and Pakistan.The IMF is designed to serve the interests of the people who hold voting shares in it’s board. The IMF conditions and strings that are applied to it’s loan programs are designed to kick down the doors of protections for local, developing economies so they can be rapaciously exploited by American companies and firms. Wages are slashed, social safety nets discarded, taxes on businesses and industries withdrawn, mineral rights given away at throw away prices. The IMF is designed to enable the neo-colonial exploitation of the Global south and has played it’s part in the wealth transfer from the south to the Developed North long after those countries stopped being colonies on paper.It’s time we parted ways with this parasitic institution and looked for home grown solutions and alternative financing institutions like the AIIB.GrowthThe Austerity driven model of economic stabilization proposed by the IMF and other economic institutions had disastrous results, not just in the above mentioned states but also Greece during the recent economic crises.The incredible disaster of the Greek austerity debacle is something that will go down in history books. There are many fingers to point in this drama: The IMF (to a lesser extent this time) and the Greek government with their own bad spending and number fudging. The EU banks and the political chiefs who steered it’s fate perhaps gave the single greatest blow to the EU project when they pushed for austerity to “punish” Greece for some perceived sin.When the recession hit, and a new Socialist government exposed New Democracy’s cooked books, investors fled. The Greek government could not rollover its debt and risked default. Greek banks, which held large amounts of government debt, became precarious. German and French banks also had invested so heavily in Greece that their stability was in jeopardy. The Greek government and banks were so closely intertwinedthat a default by one could bring down the other.The sensible solution at this point would have been to compel foreign banks to write off large parts of their Greek investments. The banks knew the risks when they made their loans and presumably priced that into the interest they charged. The European Central Bank stoutly resisted this, fearing for the stability of these imprudent banks.Instead, the EU and other international financial institutions offered what has widely been described as a “bail-out.” This was not, for the most part, money to support human services or other forms of consumption. Instead, this was money for Greece to send right back to its external creditors. In essence, the international institutions were bailing out their own irresponsible banks but laundering the money through the Greek government.As a price for this “bail-out,” the EU and its partners demanded crippling austerity: tax increases, widespread lay-offs of public employees, and massive cuts in pensions and other social supports. Laying off so many workers and pauperizing pensioners sharply reduced demand, which triggered further lay-offs and wage cuts in the private sector. As the depression deepened, unemployment topped 25 percent. When austerity devastated the Socialists’ working-class constituency, the party was effectively destroyed.As powerful as the EU is, however, it was unable to rewrite the basic rules of economics. Each round of austerity further depressed the economy, reducing revenues and increasing Greece’s deficit. Even from the creditors’ perspective, austerity was self-defeating.Rather than recognizing the error of their ways, the international organizations doubled down on austerity, demanding still deeper cuts to government employment and basic public services. The hypocrisy was rich: Greece’s deficit was growing precisely because it was complying with the EU's austerity plan, whose implementation predictably misfired.With their economy in free-fall and the EU showing no inclination to reduce the pressure, Greek voters turned to anti-austerity parties. On the right, this elevated the neo-fascist, swastika-flashing Golden Dawn, whose leaders faced charges for killing political opponents. The majority, however, went to Syriza, a leftist group that pledged to stare down the EUand end austerity.The EU, however, stonewalled, forcing Syriza to choose between taking Greece out of the EU and implementing further rounds of crushing austerity. Syriza blinked in this stare-down, fracturing its membership and earning the ire of its voters. Since then, it has been governing in fragilecoalitions with small conservative parties, largely abandoning the aspirational program it ran on.Eventually, the International Monetary Fund pressured the EU to relent on austerity. But by then, the Greek economy had shrunk by more than a quarter, numerous Greek families had horror stories of losing their homes, being unable to support themselves, or lacking medical care for treatable conditions, and Syriza had been thoroughly discredited with Greek voters.Will we learn from the Greece austerity debacle?Contrast the EU’s austerity push with the Keynesian Stimulus driven economic recovery championed by President Obama in the US during the 2008 recession which urged that in the face of slowing Economic Growth the government must inject a stimulus into the economy to stir up consumption and spending and avoid a short recession turning into a long one.Another group, the Keynesians, subscribed to the policies advocated by their namesake in the aftermath of the Great Depression, when John Maynard Keynes argued that, by taking care of unemployment, the economy would look after itself: the need was to stimulate consumption and demand to prevent a negative spiral of declining confidence, lower spending, and more job losses and firm bankruptcies. This is, in effect, the policy pursued by President Obama, with large-scale stimulus packages (although the magnitude has been debated), including substantial investment in the automobile industry. A third group of supply-side economists argued that the problem was over-regulation, or ‘red tape’, and advocated massive deregulation. They believed that abolition of employment rights would enable wages to fall and unwanted labour to be shed, allowing firms to compete better in a global market. However, a new school of thought emerged, labelled ‘austerions’ by the economics Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.Five years on, the results of the ‘great austerity experiment’ are at last becoming clear (Fig 1). In the USA, where a Keynesian approach was adopted, the economy has recovered and is now on a sustained upward trajectory. The Eurozone is experiencing mixed fortunes. Some countries, such as Germany, are also experiencing sustained growth, but those that adopted stringent austerity policies, such as Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal, have yet to recover. Iceland, one of the worst affected countries, held a referendum on austerity; 93% of the population rejected it and, so far, austerity has been delayed and limited. As a result, Iceland has had much better economic performance than the latter group of austerity cases (in part, enabled by its ability to devalue its currency and, in so doing, boost fishing exports). Paradoxically, the credit-rating agencies, which were once in the vanguard of calls for austerity, are now downgrading Italian banks explicitly because of concerns that austerity is choking off growth.The UK did make an initial recovery but there too the imposition of stringent austerity measures by the newly elected coalition government in 2010 arrested it. This evidence has not gone unnoticed and, in a series of elections across Europe in 2012, voters have rejected austerity and elected politicians offering an alternative, most notably in France but also in German regional elections. Yet their reasons for doing so are not simply because these policies have failed to fix the economy. They are also rejecting them because they are seeing the signs of the human cost that they incur, something that many politicians have sought to ignore.Austerity: a failed experiment on the people of EuropeWhen Austerity has been such a debacle across the Globe as a policy measure to stabilize economies, why exactly should the government engage in it yet again at a time when the economy is slowing down and austerity measures will heap unnecessary pain on already hapless masses?The Keynesian stimulus approach has already show tried and true effectiveness in the US and other western hemisphere economic recoveries. CPEC as an investment tool is an excellent way to achieve such a stimulus by spurring economic activity and growth and allowing the government to stabilize it’s finances while it works to cut away the wasteful and nonproductive expenditures and grow its tax base at the same time.CPEC transitions economy away for global warming eraRecently I shared this news clipping about Pakistani and Chinese scientists on the verge of a scientific breakthrough where they could develop a strain of hybrid rice that can withstand drought and high heat conditions:Pakistan, Chinese researchers on the brink of hybrid rice breakthroughI recall that 2 or 3 years ago when the CPEC master plan was revealed and there was a huge concern over a previously unrevealed agricultural aspect of CPEC. Everyone up until then had assumed it was an infrastructure, energy and logistics related project.In all honesty, I consider the agricultural aspect of CPEC to be the most important one because it’s based around three core objectives:Transition Pakistan’s agriculture away from water intensive crops to crops that utilize less water but contribute more to the GDPTransition from current breed of crops to a new strain that are more resistant to the drought and arid conditions we will face in the 21st century of Global WarmingTransition from the British canal based system of watering crops via flood irrigation which is incredibly wasteful to new systems like Drip Water irrigation and crop zoning etc that are more efficient at water usage.Pakistan is lunging into a serious water crisis. The country is rapidly moving from being a water abundant country to a water-scarce country.With its annual water availability falling below 1,000 cubic metres per person, it may in fact have already crossed this threshold. This is partly due to depletion of its fresh water resources because of increasing population, adverse climate variations like drought and inconsistent monsoon patterns, and lack of storage facilities. And it is partially due to the unchecked demand for these many limited available resources.The scope of the crisis can be demonstrated by a few key facts: About 92 percent of Pakistan is classified as semi-arid to arid and the vast majority of Pakistanis are dependent on surface and groundwater sources from a single source – the Indus River basin.More than 90 percent of the country’s water is being used by the agriculture sector where conventional irrigation methods are undertaken.About 90 percent of the country’s agricultural production comes from land irrigated by the Indus Basin Irrigation System, firmly linking national food security to water levels in the Indus River basin. And, Pakistan’s water storage capacity is limited to a maximum 30-day supply, far below the 1,000-day storage capacity recommended for a country with its climatic characteristics.With water availability per person declining year by year, and demand for food production continuously increasing, Pakistan faces not only a water crisis but also serious concerns regarding its future food security. This situation also has clear implications for the government’s efforts to become an upper middle income country by 2025.The relevant authorities should carry out a study to assess the national water demand which should focus on different water users, water balance, traditional and emerging demands, and the impacts of climate change on demand by 2025 and 2050. In order for the government to take informed decisions, sectoral demands have to be estimated for all sectors. This will give an idea to the policymakers about which sectors consume most water.Studies like these will also help realize the contribution each sector makes towards the national economy as per their water usage. For instance, according to a report, four major crops that consume about 80 percent of the country’s water resources (wheat, rice, cotton and sugarcane) generate less than five percent of the national GDP.Furthermore, experts suggest that rain water harvesting must be introduced in local households, in both urban and rural areas. Flood irrigation should be a criminal act that is still being practiced in Pakistan; this has to stop. Improved irrigation methods and crop zoning are the country’s need at the moment. There is a need to reuse water in houses; for example, the water used in our kitchens can be reused in our toilets.Disappearing waterI understand that agriculture is not the most interesting subject and in this day and age we have just assumed the constant availability of food.But climate change is going to complete alter the environmental, economic and social landscape of the Pakistani territories. And it is imperative that we pursue the agricultural related initiatives of CPEC at all costs and as fast as possible.Let me stress that a little more strongly: Even if we take on $100 billion of debt under CPEC, it will be worth it if for no other reason, we can get our agriculture to survive in the Global Warming era.It is disingenuous to talk about finances when we are talking about the very survival of the country. If you think I’m being over dramatic, I would urge you to read up on the catastrophic consequences of what will happen if we continue to keep our water usage and agriculture as is and refuse to adapt. We are seeing a mini version of this dark future in Karachi where water mafia must be paid to get your water tanks filled and access to clean water is shrinking every day.Imagine that on a nationwide level with violent mobs and riots over water shortages, food prices sky rocketing due to crop failures and militarization of water access to secure scarce water resources for the state and it’s elite.The Maldives are currently on the chopping block of Climate Change and people believe that they as a state will be wiped out by rising sea levels. Should we tell the Maldives that it’s not financially feasible to construct infrastructure that will adapt them to the Climate change era?Quorans who are often suspicious of CPEC as a colonization project: India is one of the key partner with Israel on how to adapt biotechnology in the agricultural sector so that water usage is optimized and crops adapt to the hot, arid and water stressed future. And even increase their yields in some cases. So if it’s ok for India to undertake such projects, then why not Pakistan?One more thing: While ~50+% of our economy stems from the services sector, the other half is predominately still agricultural at 23% and Industrial at 18%.Besides ensuring that our agricultural sector survives into the 21st century with the adaption of cutting edge agricultural tech from China, CPEC also allows us to begin to transition our economy away from sectors that are in danger from climate change towards new sectors that will surive the global warming era.An example of that is trade logistics: CPEC’s massive road, rail, port and highway network is planned to be integrated into China’s OBOR project so that we can develop new sources of revenue in the form of logistics related fees from Chinese companies and traders utilizing CPEC infrastructure.This is a good example of an economic sector Pakistan currently doesn’t have but it will definitely need in the future to diversify away from purely Agricultural related exports.Take a look at some of our exports by category data in 2018:source: Pakistan Exports By CategoryOne of the more sensible and realistic calculations for our earnings from CPEC toll fees was given at $2-$2.5 billion USD a year.CPEC toll income — myth and reality | The Express TribuneOur agricultural exports in 2018 are at $15 b USD a year.With 2.5 billion USD in toll fees, we have managed to diversify our export or dollar related earnings by around 16% away from our top earning crops.This is a good start. And we need to continue building on it. Our economy must transition away from purely agriculture related earnings in the Global Heat Wave of the future and move towards sectors that are immune or semi immune to Global Warming.This is how CPEC plans to accomplish this using a mix of financing for the agricultural sector, new plans for fertilizer usage, new watering techniques and sustainable agriculture through more revenue per crop capita:For agriculture, the plan outlines an engagement that runs from one end of the supply chain all the way to the other. From provision of seeds and other inputs, like fertiliser, credit and pesticides, Chinese enterprises will also operate their own farms, processing facilities for fruits and vegetables and grain. Logistics companies will operate a large storage and transportation system for agrarian produce.It identifies opportunities for entry by Chinese enterprises in the myriad dysfunctions that afflict Pakistan’s agriculture sector. For instance, “due to lack of cold-chain logistics and processing facilities, 50% of agricultural products go bad during harvesting and transport”, it notes.Enterprises entering agriculture will be offered extraordinary levels of assistance from the Chinese government. They are encouraged to “[m]ake the most of the free capital and loans” from various ministries of the Chinese government as well as the China Development Bank. The plan also offers to maintain a mechanism that will “help Chinese agricultural enterprises to contact the senior representatives of the Government of Pakistan and China”.The government of China will “actively strive to utilize the national special funds as the discount interest for the loans of agricultural foreign investment”. In the longer term the financial risk will be spread out, through “new types of financing such as consortium loans, joint private equity and joint debt issuance, raise funds via multiple channels and decentralise financing risks”.The plan proposes to harness the work of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps to bring mechanization as well as scientific technique in livestock breeding, development of hybrid varieties and precision irrigation to Pakistan. It sees its main opportunity as helping the Kashgar Prefecture, a territory within the larger Xinjiang Autonomous Zone, which suffers from a poverty incidence of 50 per cent, and large distances that make it difficult to connect to larger markets in order to promote development. The prefecture’s total output in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery amounted to just over $5 billion in 2012, and its population was less than 4 million in 2010, hardly a market with windfall gains for Pakistan.However, for the Chinese, this is the main driving force behind investing in Pakistan’s agriculture, in addition to the many profitable opportunities that can open up for their enterprises from operating in the local market. The plan makes some reference to export of agriculture goods from the ports, but the bulk of its emphasis is focused on the opportunities for the Kashgar Prefecture and Xinjiang Production Corps, coupled with the opportunities for profitable engagement in the domestic market.The plan discusses those engagements in considerable detail. Ten key areas for engagement are identified along with seventeen specific projects. They include the construction of one NPK fertilizer plant as a starting point “with an annual output of 800,000 tons”. Enterprises will be inducted to lease farm implements, like tractors, “efficient plant protection machinery, efficient energy saving pump equipment, precision fertilization drip irrigation equipment” and planting and harvesting machinery.The plan shows great interest in the textiles industry in particular, but the interest is focused largely on yarn and coarse cloth.Meat processing plants in Sukkur are planned with annual output of 200,000 tons per year, and two demonstration plants processing 200,000 tons of milk per year. In crops, demonstration projects of more than 6,500 acres will be set up for high yield seeds and irrigation, mostly in Punjab. In transport and storage, the plan aims to build “a nationwide logistics network, and enlarge the warehousing and distribution network between major cities of Pakistan” with a focus on grains, vegetables and fruits. Storage bases will be built first in Islamabad and Gwadar in the first phase, then Karachi, Lahore and another in Gwadar in the second phase, and between 2026-2030, Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar will each see another storage base.Asadabad, Islamabad, Lahore and Gwadar will see a vegetable processing plant, with annual output of 20,000 tons, fruit juice and jam plant of 10,000 tons and grain processing of 1 million tons. A cotton processing plant is also planned initially, with output of 100,000 tons per year.“We will impart advanced planting and breeding techniques to peasant households or farmers by means of land acquisition by the government, renting to China-invested enterprises and building planting and breeding bases” it says about the plan to source superior seeds.In each field, Chinese enterprises will play the lead role. “China-invested enterprises will establish factories to produce fertilizers, pesticides, vaccines and feedstuffs” it says about the production of agricultural materials.“China-invested enterprises will, in the form of joint ventures, shareholding or acquisition, cooperate with local enterprises of Pakistan to build a three-level warehousing system (purchase & storage warehouse, transit warehouse and port warehouse)” it says about warehousing.Then it talks about trade. “We will actively embark on cultivating surrounding countries in order to improve import and export potential of Pakistani agricultural products and accelerate the trade of agricultural products. In the early stages, we will gradually create a favorable industry image and reputation for Pakistan by relying on domestic demand.”Exclusive: CPEC master plan revealedAnd Logistics is only part of the equation: Chinese investments are a diverse portfolio of energy, tourism, mining, public transportation and real estate to give a few examples. Most if not all of these are good diversification away from climate change impacted economic sectors that we expect major disruptions in once water shortages and droughts start to hit more frequently in the next decade.I really want to under line this point again because recall that in the beginning of the answer I talked about how it’s ok to take on debt that ensures the survival and prosperity of our future generations, we should only avoid debt that is for day to day running of current government expenses.CPEC debt is a debt that we are undertaking today to ensure that our children have a future in an era where the Indus Basin will begin turning into a desert and our children will grow up eating crops and meats that are far different from the ones we grew up eating because in their era, those crops and sources of food might not exist in our region anymore.The TLDR Conclusion:Pakistan’s Debt is because of two major reasons:Lack of tax baseEnormous wastage and leakages in government spendingPakistan has been under IMF programs for decades and they have never fixed the government’s problems because the IMF exists to push for a neo-liberal free market order that favors the US rather than fix Pakistan’s problemsAt a time of slow economic growth, embracing an IMF led austerity drive is a suicidal quest. The 2008 economic crises and government responses to it showed that Keynesian style stimulus packages to stir up the economy is what leads to recovery.CPEC is a Keynesian style stimulus for the Pak economy at a time when it’s slowing down. The OBOR, AIIB and CPEC style of infrastructure and trade led growth is critical for low growth developing countries to stir economic growth and avoid the misery of Greek austerity.Beyond just stirring economic growth, CPEC is part of Pakistan’s transition away from an agricultural/semi industrialized country to a more balanced mix of logistics/industry/trade/agriculture/consumption. It also allows the country to adapt to the water stressed, heat wave era of the Climate Change epoch of history.Not everything about CPEC is rosy. This would be a dishonest answer if I said that. We do need to investigate how much our local industries would be impacted by Chinese imports. We do need to investigate that the projects in CPEC have the right ROIs given their expenditure. That these projects are aligned with our long term aims. And that the debt repayments can be met with the ROI from these projects. These are basic precautions.But in general, CPEC is a lifeline for a country like ours thats trapped in debt and low growth in the face of annihilation from climate change. We’re supposed to face the potential heat death of the planet with our economy chained to a wall.The old Pakistan is gone. This will be our second major transformation after 71. And in some ways, it will be more dangerous to navigate and more critical to our survival. The Indus Basin has always been there in the living memory of mankind. It might not be in the near future.We will be walking our children to schools in the deserts of southern Punjab. And driving past the dried out caverns of the now dead Ravi. The very rice we eat will taste different. I’ll tell my children stories of how fruit used to be so cheap and abundant in my life time. How we’d let water run into the street while washing our cars. How Monsoon used to be a fun time to play in the canal rather than a tropical flood that washed away entire communities.A memory can only survive in the minds of the living. When the earth changes, we must change with it. The age of arrogant men telling women to stay in the home is over. The age of you turning your nose up at your neighbor because his faith is different from you is over. It’s a fight to survive the heat death of the earth, we will need all the help we can get. We need to rethink our ideas about “honor” and “Izzat” and right and wrong. The uncaring laws of the universe dont care for our mortal hang ups.CPEC will turn farmers into truck drivers, gun smiths into bio tech technicians and cloth weavers into aqua farmers.I suppose in a way, it’s like changing shape and form, changing bodies and the chemicals that animate them. CPEC will change us all. And there might be no future without it.The translucence of flames beat against the airagainst our skins. This can be done withor without clothes on. This can be done withor without wine or whiskey but never without water:evaporation is also ongoing. Most visibly in this casein the form of wisps of steam rising from the just washed hairof a form at the fire whose beauty was in the earth’sturning, that night and many nights, transcendent.I felt heat changing me. The word for this istransdesire, but in extreme cases we call it transdireor when this heat becomes your maker we saytransire, or when it happens in front of a hearth:transfire.On Trans by Miller ObermanA man drives an improvised motorcycle truck, balancing a precarious load behind him. Perhaps the best image to portray our economy, straddled by debt, innovating it’s way to survival in the 21st century.Image source: China’s $62 Billion Bet on Pakistan

Antisemitism is nothing if not a complex topic. Discussing why it exists is therefore going to take a while (this answer is pushing about 7000 words), and there’s no simple answer. However, boiling it down to its crux: people hate Jews because they choose to do so. A slightly longer answer can be found by skipping down to Part VII, but for the full historical context, well, you don’t have to read this all at once.Part I: Judaism and ChristianityThere are, in general, two ways of how people hate Jews. The older of the two ways is hatred of Judaism, which is to say, hatred of the people due to their religion. Scholarship usually refers to this as “anti-Judaism,” although the term “religious antisemitism” also pops up in literature. At most, anti-Judaism goes back about two-and-a-half millennia, mostly because Judaism itself — or at least, Judaism in a form recognizable to modern-day Jews — only really came to be in an Exilic[1] and post-Exilic context. One can also make an argument that, insofar as modern Judaism is descended exclusively from Pharisaism during the Second Temple Era, anti-Judaism can only date back about two thousand years.Anti-Judaism predates Christianity. The works of Josephus, a first century Jewish general and historian, include Against Apion, a critique and refutation of an anti-Jewish text by a Greek pagan named, unsurprisingly, Apion. However, it was generally not a significant force during that time, with most negative feelings towards Jews being political in nature, resenting the Jewish state that existed at the time, the Hasmonean Kingdom. Even during subsequent Roman rule, anti-Judaism was a weak force: Judaism and the Roman state cult may have been incompatible, but participation in the Roman state cult was only desired by the Romans insofar as it demonstrated loyalty to Rome, and so long as the Jews proved themselves loyal in other ways, Rome generally did not care about the difference in religion.The reason anti-Judaism came to be as powerful as it was — and to a lesser extent is — was not actually external to Judaism, but rather, internal to it. In the first century, a small apocalyptic cult-cum-reform movement centered around a Nazarene itinerant preacher started gaining traction within Judaism. At the time, this wasn’t a particularly interesting development, because apocalyptic cults were actually quite common during the Second Temple period. The interaction between the adherents of the new branch and the various other sects of Judaism at the time was generally, and unsurprisingly, hostile.We frequently see this sort of thing in world history. As an example, the Protestant Reformation saw Protestants and Catholics declaring each other servants of the devil. Thus, it’s unsurprising that even the holy texts of Christianity, composed when it was still a Jewish sect, contain some fairly obvious potshots at mainstream Judaism. In particular, when we look at the Gospel of Matthew, the text refers to Jews as Israelites until the crucifixion, at which point they are referred to as Judah-ites. This difference in naming is important: the name “Israel” was given to the patriarch Jacob by a messenger of the Almighty, and therefore symbolizes the special relationship between Jews and the Almighty. By stripping the Jews of the name Israelite, therefore, the author of Matthew was stating that, in taking the responsibility for crucifying Jesus,[2] the Jews had abandoned their relationship with the Almighty. Putting it more simply, the author of Matthew states that mainstream Judaism is not true Judaism, and that only Judeo-Christianity counts as such.This being said, it would be difficult to claim the author of Matthew to have been anti-Jewish, as he was himself Jewish — we don’t claim Martin Luther to have been anti-Christian for having written scathingly about the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. The author of Matthew was scathingly anti-Pharisee — as were the authors of Mark, Luke, and John — but not anti-Jewish. Within two centuries, however, the differences between “Pharisee” and “Jew” had essentially disappeared,[3] with Pharisaic Judaism being the only surviving sect of Judaism from the Second Temple Era. Thus, texts written in the context of an intra-religious feud were now considered holy by a separate religion, and the intra-religious feud morphed into an inter-religious feud.This was not a battle Judaism could win. Pharisaic Judaism — now called “Rabbinic Judaism” or just plain “Judaism” — required adherence to both the Written Law (the Torah) and the Oral Law (what would subsequently be compiled into the Talmud). Judeo-Christianity also required this adherence in the early stages, with Jesus and the people who knew him being observant Jews. However, the Apostle Paul began a push within Judeo-Christianity to reject the Law, or at least, aspects of it. This position made evangelism among gentiles significantly easier.[4] The result of this was that Christianity grew in a way that Judaism could not.However, rejection of the Law and the growth of Christianity through conversion precipitated massive changes within Christianity. Certainly rejecting the Law led to differences in practice between Rabbinic Jews and Judeo-Christians, but the religious rationale for such a rejection also essentially mandated theological differences to arise. Additionally, without the Law existing to enforce some sort of Overton Window of theology, the new converts changed Christianity significantly on their own. St. Augustine of Hippo, for example, introduced elements of Neoplatonism and Manichaeism that would almost certainly have been rejected in Judaism, but proved foundational to Christianity.By the time of Emperor Constantine I, Christianity was clearly a separate religion from Judaism,[5] and a far more popular one. However, the legacy of internecine fighting within Judaism remained, and would continue to have a significant impact on Jewish-Christian relations for centuries to come.Part II: Judaism and IslamAnti-Jewish sentiment during the Early Middle Ages was a largely disorganized affair. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as virtually all entities during the Early Middle Ages (500–1000) were highly decentralized, with the dominant political system being feudalism. In the Byzantine Empire, the integration of Church and State meant there were discriminatory laws on the books, although persecution of Jews tended to be rather less severe than persecution of other groups, such as the Manichaeans.Instead, it’s more interesting during this time to look at another Abrahamic religion’s relationship to Judaism. Judaism had a significant presence in the Hejaz, particularly in the city of Yathrib,[6] starting from the Second Century. There were also Christians present in the region, and as one would expect, the two groups didn’t get along. Another important player in the region was the pagan religion native to it.Starting in 610, a man named Muhammad, who lived in Mecca, began preaching a new religion. Thanks to his teachings not being written down and compiled until after his death, we don’t know exactly what he preached,[7] but it certainly bears non-incidental resemblances to both Judaism and Christianity — and a few grabs from local paganism.[8] Like what had happened with Jesus some six hundred years earlier, the local authorities did not much care for the disruption in the social order — unlike what happened to Jesus, Muhammad fled rather than die. Specifically, in 622, he and his followers ran to the city of Yathrib.[9]Muhammad’s early position towards both Jews and Christians was one of respect. However, he was not met with any particular warmth or respect, and most Jews remained Jews.[10] His attitude toward both Jews and Christians therefore hardened, and eventually culminated in open warfare between Jews and Muslims in the city, as well as forced conversions to Islam following the military defeat of the Jews.[11]This being said, most of early Islam’s antipathy towards the Jews appears to have been rather weaker than Christianity’s. Islamic empires would subsequently lump Jews and Christians into the category of dhimmi — second-class citizens responsible for paying a tax called the jizya — but most Islamic empires were otherwise tolerant of their Jews, and generally spent far less time and effort in degrading them than Christian societies did. This being said, second-class citizens often engender feelings of contempt in the first-class citizens, and these feelings had centuries to harden.Discussing anti-Judaism in any other context besides a Christian or Muslim one really isn’t all that interesting. The overwhelming majority of Jewish people lived either among Jews or among Christians, and those who forged communities elsewhere — most notably India and China — experienced little to no hatred from the surrounding society.Part III: Anti-Judaism’s Horrific PeakIn general, documentation from the Early Middle Ages is scarce, hence the epoch’s former name of “the Dark Ages.” The era was one of great decentralization, with local warlords exercising most of the power, and weak trade networks. What this means is that, for the most part, displays of hatred of Jews were, as much as they could be, banal: the structures in place disadvantaged Jews, but virtually all incidents were small, contained, and unremarkable.However, the decentralized state of affairs started shifting in the 800’s, and by the year 1095, France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire were certainly in the process of consolidating power, and feudalism was generally in decline. However, the centralization of power required vast sums of money, and frequently more than tax income alone could provide.[12]Modern states and institutions use bonds and other similar securities for a quick infusion of money. However, a thousand years ago, there was neither a bond market nor any conception of securitization of debt. What these kingdoms, baronies, monasteries, bishoprics, et cetera, required was a moneylender. However, Christianity at the time strictly forbade charging interest on loans, and Christians at the time did not find ways of skirting that law as Muslims did with regards to Islam’s strict prohibition on charging interest.[13] Of course, nobody was about to loan thousands of marks without the potential for profit, as that would constitute significant risk without any, let alone commensurate, reward. Had Europe been strictly Christian, feudalism would have taken much longer to die than it actually did. However, because Judaism does not forbid its adherents for charging interest on loans to gentiles, Western Europe had a viable lending system.To be clear, most people had little-to-no interaction with Jewish moneylenders. The peasantry would have had no need of it — the home mortgage didn’t yet exist, and small businesses were “you work on a farm, keep working on the farm.” However, aristocrats and churchmen did interact with the Jews so as to secure otherwise unavailable loans. The potential for profit here was gigantic, to the point that the richest man in twelfth century England was Aaron of Lincoln, who, at his death in the late twelfth century, was owed no less than £15,000.[14] He was not the only Jew to get wealthy off of this business.In 1095, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade, and things went to hell for Jews in a big way.Transcriptions of Urban’s address that November don’t agree with each other. However, the transcriptions do share common themes, and what most of the speech boils down to is a call for Christians to stop killing each other in Europe and start killing the infidel in the Holy Land. The way the peasantry in Europe seems to have taken this, however, came out to “kill the infidel” — and the nearest ones were their Jewish neighbors, who also happened to be wealthy (or at least perceived to be).The result was tragically predictable. About 8000 Jews were murdered during the Rhineland massacres of 1096. There had been massacres of Jews in western Europe prior to this, but the Rhineland massacres dwarfed them in scale. It took until the Holocaust for the Rhineland massacres to be displaced in the Jewish cultural memory. The massacres also seem to have set off a wave of other attacks on Jews. The blood libel was invented about fifty years later. This was a pernicious lie that stated Jews killed Christian children to consume their blood — it may have come about from deliberate misrepresentation of stories of Jews committing suicide and killing their own children rather than being forced to convert or being even more gruesomely murdered. And while the blood libel was a horrible lie, one can at least try to argue that had it been true (and it had not been), massacre of those responsible may have not been completely inappropriate. The same cannot be said over the numerous Jews murdered over rumors that they had tortured communion wafers.There were essentially two different groups acting in the massacres. The peasantry, for the most part, would have been religiously motivated: centuries of telling people their neighbors are responsible for murdering their god has that sort of effect. However, in the case of the petty aristocracy, arms and armor for going on a Crusade weren’t cheap, and many borrowed money to be able to afford them. Killing their creditors would release them from debt, or at the very least, interest payments.[15]For the most part, those higher up in the totem pole tended to protect Jews in these situations. Even in cases where monarchs expelled Jews, they usually granted safe conduct out of the country, as with England’s Edict of Expulsion, or France’s expulsions of 1182, 1306, and 1394. In cases beyond expulsion, protection of the Jewish community was roughly equivalent to protection of the finance sector: while the ruling class almost certainly held the same anti-Jewish views as the peasantry, letting the moneylenders be murdered en masse and also have their property be appropriated by the rabble hardly constituted self-interest. This protection wasn’t always effective — the Jews of Worms were massacred in 1096 despite the protection of the local bishop — but it was frequently proffered, even if only from naked and obvious self-interest and usually not from the simple moral truth that murdering people is wrong.As the section header for this part points out, I consider the Rhineland massacres and most of the murders of the High Middle Ages to be the fullest flowering of anti-Judaism. This is far from a universally held opinion, but insofar as the majority of the massacres were explicitly religiously motivated and as the victims were usually offered a way out through conversion to Christianity, religious-based hatred is the obvious culprit here. This would change with the dawning of the modern era.Part IV: Alhambra, the Zaporizhian Sich, and the Birth of AntisemitismUp until this point, we’ve explored anti-Jewish sentiment almost entirely through a religious lens. Although there were economic considerations in play during the mass murders of the High and Late Middle Ages, without the religious hatred, they wouldn’t have occurred. This becomes significantly less true when we look at the incidents of the Early Modern Period.On 2 January 1492, the last Muslim enclave on the Iberian Peninsula fell, bringing over seven centuries of Muslim rule of Al-Andalus to a close. Less than three months later, the rulers of Christian Spain, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, signed the Alhambra Decree, expelling the Jewish population. Christian Spain had been virulently and, to be frank unusually, hostile towards Jews during the late stages of the Reconquista, and after an especially massive wave of violence against Jews in 1391, roughly half the Jewish community of Spain converted to Catholicism.Throughout most of European history to this point, those conversions probably would not have been heavily scrutinized. Of course, in most places in western Europe, the Jewish community was somewhat dispersed. This was not the case in Spain, which had a large Jewish community of about 200,000 before the conversions. As the conversions were forced, there were legitimate questions of their sincerity and durability — forcing a conversion when there isn’t a large community of other forced converts (called anusim) is more likely to stick simply on the basis of effective isolation from the old community.Even though a century had passed since the 1391 conversions, the Spanish state still believed there were many crypto-Jews among the conversos. These crypto-Jews, who faked adherence to Catholicism and practiced Judaism in secret, are now frequently known by the pejorative marrano, a Spanish word meaning “swine.” The presence of crypto-Jews in Spain enraged Isabella, leading to her choosing to expel the openly practicing Jews from Spain.This seems like another case of anti-Judaism, but there are enough differences here that we’re actually looking at a somewhat different type of hatred of Jews. Specifically, when we look at the Jews who converted to Catholicism rather than move, things look very different indeed.Traditionally, Christianity has not made a distinction, theologically or doctrinally, between a new convert and someone descended from generations of Christians. Following the mass conversions of 1391, however, Spain started making those distinctions, creating tests of limpieza de sangre — the purity of blood. So-called “New Christians” were considered to have tainted blood, and were subject to various legal restrictions on rights. Documentation regarding one’s blood purity became important in Spain and subsequently Portugal. Any convert to Christianity in one’s genealogy going back four generations (to one’s great-grandparents) would be enough to make a person a New Christian.[16]This isn’t anti-Judaism. Anti-Judaism’s prejudices end should a Jew convert, but the Inquisition was enforcing discrimination against New Christians decades after their forefathers had died, let alone converted. This, combined with a formal concept of blood purity, points to a hatred of Judaism that transcends religion. This is a race-based hatred, and this is what we talk about when we talk about antisemitism generally: the sneaky, cunning Jew blood will eventually out.For the other massive shift in antisemitism in the early modern period, we have to skip over to the Rzeczpospolita — the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Jews only started moving to Poland in appreciable numbers during the First Crusade. Poland had, at that point, only been a Christian state for slightly more than a century, and it would not be until the thirteenth century that Catholicism would become the dominant religion in Poland. As such, there was no history of anti-Judaism within Poland, and it was a safe place for Jews.The problems came from the success of the Rzeczpospolita. The Rzeczpospolita ended up expanding into Ruthenia (what is now Ukraine), but the absorption wasn’t on equal terms, and the Ruthenian nobility of the area was generally crapped on by the Polish and Lithuanian nobility. Additionally, the nobles who owned property in the area were frequently absentee landlords. Combine this with the religious differences between the Ruthenians — who were Eastern Orthodox — and the Poles — Roman Catholic — and there was a decidedly unstable situation.Violence exploded in Ruthenia in 1648. Led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Zaporizhian Cossacks rampaged through the region, massacring large numbers of people.[17] Jews in particular were targeted, but not for any religious reason: the aforementioned absentee landlords usually used Jews to manage their properties, including collecting rents.[18] In other words, the slaughter had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with class. However, even after the mass murder ended and the social structure of Ruthenia stood permanently altered, the resentment and hatred of the Jewish population remained.This modality of hating Jews hadn’t previously been a massive phenomenon. Again, previously, most hatred of the Jews was religiously based. But in moving to class- and race-based hatred, Europe was giving birth to modern antisemitism, a phenomenon both intimately concerned with and completely unrelated to Jews.Part V: Antisemitism from the Eighteenth Century until the Mid-TwentiethStarting in the eighteenth century, Europe started asking what would come to be known as “the Jewish Question.”[19] Jews had spent most of the preceding centuries in Europe essentially being a nation within other nations, but in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, the general European adoption of the idea of Westphalian sovereignty, and the blooming of liberal thought in the Enlightenment, the idea of the nation-state came to the fore, which also had the effect of making the nation-within-nations state of affairs seem suboptimal.One of the more commonly proposed answers to the Jewish Question was emancipation: the elimination of discriminatory laws targeting the Jews, and the enabling of Jewish integration into society as a whole. For poorer Jews — in other words, the overwhelming majority — this would have been a highly attractive option, but for the wealthier court Jews — those who had served as financiers to church and aristocracy — emancipation was actually undesirable as it would strip them of privilege.[20]It’s this privilege we have to discuss. As mentioned in Part III of this answer, the relationship between the state and its Jews was often a paternalistic one in Western and Central Europe: the state provided explicit protection against the remainder of the population to its Jews. This identified the Jew with the state in the mind of the population, including the Jews. There were obvious exceptions — Russia, for example, had virtually no Jewish population until the eighteenth century, and therefore did not go through the same process as the rest of the continent — but this identification was common.What this also meant was that, as Hannah Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, gentile Europe’s view of Jews was strongly correlated with its view on government. The Prussian aristocracy prior to Napoleon freely associated with Jews, but when the state became a French puppet, this association ended, only to be restarted after Napoleon’s defeat.This state of affairs continued even in post-emancipatory states. France’s Dreyfus Affair, for example, took place from 1894 to 1906, over sixty years after full emancipation of the Jews. Dreyfus was an army officer framed for espionage and convicted by a kangaroo court. Within two years, an investigation turned up the actual culprit. Rather than exonerate Dreyfus, the military exonerated the guilty party, then tacked more charges onto Dreyfus. French society split over whether or not Dreyfus was guilty. Specifically, liberals usually fell into the Dreyfusard camp and conservatives usually fell into the anti-Dreyfusard camp.When we talk about fin-de-siècle France, the term “conservative” does not map to the ideology of, for example, Les Républicains of today’s electoral politics. France was less than three decades out from having been an empire, and only about a half century out from having been a monarchy. The Third Republic was still quite new, and conservatives disdained it. Bonapartism and monarchism (in both Legitimist and Orléanist forms) were not fringe movements at the time: the French had almost reformed the Bourbon monarchy in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Thus, when we say that opinion on Dreyfus correlated with views on the government, don’t think Democrats complaining about Trump or Republicans complaining about Obama, think people who don’t trust democracy. In particular, think the Catholic Church, the aristocracy, and the military. This is not to say antisemitism was a strictly conservative phenomenon, because it wasn’t. For example, identification of the Jews with the Weimar Republic brought the NSDAP to power in Germany and destroyed the republic.Left wing antisemitism was also common. Emancipation of European Jewry bred resentment among the lower classes. Where before emancipation, the social and legal structures of Europe had made even the lowliest Christian the superior of any Jew, emancipation ended that state of affairs. It didn’t matter that most Jews were not particularly wealthy, nor did it matter that the ruling classes hadn’t changed: Jews were the target of hatred. It is for this reason German social democrats often said “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”: from a socialist perspective, the left-wing antisemitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a thoroughly misguided attempt at class consciousness.The sudden improvement in social standing for Jews bred resentment among the lower classes, and resentment can be lethal. During the Second World War, the USSR occupied part of Poland, including the town of Jedwabne. The Soviets reshuffled the ruling order there, putting communists in charge, many of whom were Jews. When the Germans seized the town about two years later, the Polish population — without prompting from the German occupiers — rounded up the Jews of Jedwabne, locked them in a barn, and burned the building down. In towns nearby, such as Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where Jews had not been placed in positions of power, the Nazis had to do their own dirty work. In Jedwabne, where Polish Catholics saw Jews (not even the whole population) rise at their own expense, the Nazis only had to stroll into town.It’s resentment in particular that explains the rise of antisemitism in the Islamic world. Again, Jews had almost always been held in contempt in Muslim societies, with low-grade violence occasionally flaring up. However, with the beginning of waves of European Jewish emigration to the Levant in the nineteenth century, the image of Jew as pathetic, helpless, forsaken, impoverished target of derision became increasingly unreflective of reality.[21] Unsurprisingly, antisemitism within the Muslim world increased with the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine (which destroyed the legal superiority of Muslims), the 1947-1948 War (which permanently weakened the image of the Jew as weak), and the 1967 War (which utterly destroyed that image).Part VI: Racism and The HolocaustI have, to this point, briefly alluded to the Holocaust, but if we're going to discuss antisemitism, we're going to need to take a deeper dive into its most horrific incarnation.National Socialism is sometimes portrayed as a confused ideology. It is not. Although there is much National Socialists are willing to compromise on, including many issues other political philosophies would not view as incidental, National Socialism is a race-based political theory. The only consideration National Socialism views as non-negotiable is race. This explains, among other things, why trains kept going to the death camps even as the resources expended in making those runs could have been put to far better use in defense against the Soviet Union. It also explains why Warsaw was demolished, even though the enemy was at the gates.In Part IV of this answer, we saw the birth of a racist antisemitism in the Spanish Inquisition. However, the Spanish approach to race had been quite simple: define race as of a particular time, and go from there. So yes, there was a racial hierarchy in Spain and its colonial possessions, but this was largely facilitated by comparatively recent contact with both Amerindians and with non-Maghrebi Africans, and also the pragmatic approach of not going back too far in history to search for Jewish ancestry. Nazi racial theory, however, sought to subdivide further, including races within Europe itself. There was precedent for doing this, although only about a century of it. While linguistic, religious, and cultural differences between various European ethnic groups had always been acknowledged, they weren't seen as anything deeper: Germans were different from the French because they spoke a different language, not because of blood. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, this view changed, largely thanks to the work of a Frenchman named Artur de Gobineau. Gobineau was highly conservative and saw France as being on a downward spiral, and he sought to explain it. His thesis was that France was, in fact, composed of two different races. The nobility were descended from the Germanic tribes that had conquered Rome, while every other Frenchman was descended from the Romans' slaves. Centuries of interbreeding between the two races had weakened the stock of the aristocrats, leading to their decline in prestige and power. Gobineau's formulation proved popular among the French upper classes, but also among German liberals, who wanted to unite Germany under one banner. The Germanic race (and yes, Gobineau used the word "Aryan") being superior, and they themselves being that race's modern-day descendants, created a degree of romantic nationalism that had not previoulsy existed within the Germanophone reaches of Europe. This would later be fused with Darwin's theory of evolution to create "scientific racism.""Scientific racism" is a contradition in terms. There was no evidence to suggest Gobineau's conception of the French people was correct, and the identification of the Germanic people's superiority similarly had no evidence to support it. However, these theories were excellent for "scientifically" and "rationally" justifying irredentism, colonialism, and antisemitism. In other words, Gobineau's race theories were devised not to explain, but to justify, the heinous abuses and attitudes of the day. By itself, this would have been pernicious, but race theory is a particularly degrading worldview. While Marxist thinking can easily lead to abuses, class is a fundamentally mutable state: the proletariat may ascend to the rank of the capitalist, the capitalist may descend to the rank of the proletariat, and in the event of a revolution, the capitalist can share in the resulting society as though he had been a proletariat all along.[22] Race, however, is immutable, so that someone born a Jew will never have a place in a Germanic race state, even if she were to abandon her religion and attempt full assimilation. Thus, to a race theorist, the only possible answer to the Jewish Question is exclusion.The first choice of these race theorists was the exile of the Jews from Europe. Famously, the NSDAP considered a plan to relocate all of European Jewry to the African island of Madagascar; less famously, the Polish government had previously examined a similar policy for its own Jewish population. By the same token, Jews were allowed to leave Germany prior to the start of the Second World War, albeit with Germany robbing them blind first. However, the start of the Second World War made displacement of the Jewish population impractical, leaving only one option for the race theorists in the Third Reich: wholesale murder.To say this is depravity is, of course, understatement. However, if one (abandons all pretense of humanity and) accepts the premises of National Socialism's race theories, wholesale murder is a logical consequence. If one rejects these theories, tying up resources to murder one's own population rather than defend the realm against an invader is lunacy, but if one accepts these theories, these murders are necessary for there to be a realm to defend. According to the warped moral calculus of National Socialism, one cannot leave the people of this race alive within the borders of the state, for it is within their very blood to bring about the corruption, decline, and fall of the National Socialist state.These theories are hogwash, but they are continuous with attitudes toward Jews in Europe before that time. But while these race theories were intimately concerned with Jews, they were also curiously completely indifferent to them. Hatred of Jews as a class may be irrational, but it is at least somewhat grounded in some conception, or misconception, of what Jewish behavior is. Anti-Judaism cares deeply about actual Jewish values, Jewish behaviors, and Jewish beliefs. Race theory is unconcerned with all of this, for race theory views behavior, values, and beliefs as natural consequences of blood. The hatred here is pure, for the only supposed crime the Jew has committed to earn this enmity is existing.However, what we ought note now is that, while other antisemites may claim more sensible grounds for hatred of Jews, this is almost never true. The Third Reich was openly and nigh-mindlessly antisemitic, but it was also honest, and under it, antisemitism practically became an ouroboros.Part VII: Psychological Mechanisms of AntisemitismAntisemitism, as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his 1946 essay Réflexions sur la question juive (literally translated to "Reflections on the Jewish Question," and more commonly translated as "Anti-Semite and Jew"), is first of all a passion. It is not an opinion, and it is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. It is a premise, one irrationally adopted and then equally irrationally defended. However, what Sartre also pointed out was that this irrational defense was conscious.In an early passage of the essay, Sartre relates the story of a classmate of his who failed an entrance examination, while a Jew passed. The classmate freely admitted he had not studied for the examination, but also stated the exam was rigged, for how could an Ashkenazi Jew understand French or Latin better than a Frenchman? However, there were twenty-six people who had scored better than Sartre's classmate, fourteen of whom had failed, and only one Jew had passed. Simply, either Sartre's classmate was a great fool, a description Sartre does not give, or else he was aware of the contradictions in his claims and did not care about them.Indeed, antisemites are usually aware of the contradictions in their worldview, and not only do not care, but are actively amused by them. Because antisemites have given themselves over to not being bound by rationality, attempts to rein them in using rationality can only serve to amuse them, in the same way watching a man try to dig holes for fence posts using a dessert fork is humorous: the wrong tool for the job is being employed. Antisemitism thus often goes hand-in-hand with some form of irony.[23]These contradictions are obvious and easily found. The antisemite may value intelligence generally, but should a Jew display it - and antisemites will freely grant this is common - "intelligence" will be renamed "cunning," and will be derided. The antisemite may be cheated by a Jewish haberdasher, but will only feel resentment towards Jews generally, not also haberdashers generally. The antisemite may bar the Jew, either formally or informally, from "respectable" positions, and will then deride the Jew for engaging in "disreputable" ones - and Heaven help the Jew should she make a grand success of that career.[24] Again, we must conclude the antisemite either a fool incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, or else consciously unconcerned with rationality and sense.In other words, antisemitism is a choice people make. Because of this, we may once again quote Sartre in saying "if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him" - if there were no Jews, there would still be people inclined to bad faith and hatred, and they would need a target.[1] “Exilic” here refers to the Babylonian Exile, a fifty year period when the Neo-Babylonian Empire relocated a significant portion of the population of Judah to Babylon. Archaeological finds dating back to before and after the Exile show that the theological effects of the Exile were huge: a polytheistic religion turned into a monotheistic one.[2] An incident that almost certainly did not occur — the idea that the unquestioned dictator of Judea could have been forced to crucify a man he wanted to pardon to is laughable, and there is no evidence outside of the Gospels that suggest a tradition of granting one prisoner clemency during Passover.[3] This statement assumes that the Samaritanism is not a branch of Judaism. Arguments can be made either way on this point.[4] If I’ve learned nothing else from eating with gentiles, it’s that they sure love telling Jews just how much one misses out on by not eating pork and shellfish. By the way, if you do not keep kosher, please, please, please, please, please do not do this. It’s not that the person who keeps kosher will likely be tempted to eat the bacon in question, it’s just that this got old for them a very long time ago.[5] Although “Judaizers” would continue to maintain a significant presence in Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt until at least the fifth century.[6] Now called Medina.[7] Oh boy, am I saying some controversial stuff right here. As should be fairly clear by what I’ve written so far, I am not a Muslim, and therefore do not believe the Quran to be of divine origin. It is undeniable that the Quran was not written down until after Muhammad’s death, and with that being the case, at the very least, transcription errors were likely. Indeed, considering the very order of the text was not settled until after the time of Muhammad’s successor’s successor (legitimate if you’re a Sunni Muslim, usurper if you’re Shi’a), the chances that the text of the Quran perfectly matches what Muhammad said is fairly small.This is not to say that the Quran isn’t a perfect transcription, only that to say it is requires faith few (if any) non-Muslims have. Comments that take me to task for not having this faith (or any other faith, for that matter) will be summarily deleted.[8] Although the historicity of the so-called Satanic Verses incident (qissat al-gharaniq) is an open question, the Kaaba and the Black Stone were both important elements in the Meccan pagan religion. Islam states that neither were originally pagan artifacts and were simply corrupted by paganism, but there’s no archaeological evidence of this being true.[9] This journey is called the Hegira, and the Islamic calendar reckons time based on how many years before or after the Hegira something occurred (BH and AH).[10] A common enough occurrence: it’s not as though Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard were taken seriously by their contemporaries, either.[11] Another common enough occurrence, with Martin Luther being another great example of “I was nice enough to you, you didn’t convert, screw you.”[12] Taxation at this time largely involved going one rung lower than yourself on the social ladder, figuring out how much you could squeeze out of them all without them rising up to kill you, and then doing that. However, since this was before auditing and bureaucracy, the process of figuring out the sum was highly inexact.[13] Discussed further here: Harold Kingsberg's answer to How did Muslim traders raise investments given Islam's prohibition of usury? (Harold Kingsberg's answer to How did Muslim traders raise investments given Islam's prohibition of usury?)[14] It is difficult to compare this to modern prices. However, we do know a footsoldier in the English army would earn 2d per day, and there were 240d per pound. A private in the modern British Army gets paid about £35 13s (yes, I’m going with pre-decimalization schemes here for purposes of comparison, I said this was difficult) or £35 165d. Assuming the value of the daily wage has not changed — which is a crap assumption, but that’s all we’ve got — this translates to £15,000 in 1150 being worth about £64,000,000 now.This still understates Aaron’s wealth. Putting it in less mathematical terms, when Aaron died and the crown took over his estate, the crown opened up a new branch of government just to deal with it.[15] With interest rates frequently being in excess of 30% per annum — much of which would then be paid to the crown as tax — eliminating the obligation to pay interest was just as much worth murdering over as eliminating the obligation to pay back the principal. Which is to say that it wasn’t worth murdering over at all, but did it anyway.[16] The concept of blood purity was far from universally accepted, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who was to Spanish what Shakespeare was to English and what Ferdowsi was to Persian, made hay of mocking and deriding the idea in his writings.[17] Khmelnytsky is a controversial figure in world history. In general, he is viewed positively within Russia (for bringing Ukraine into the Russian sphere of influence), negatively within Poland (where he is often viewed as a traitor), positively within Ukraine (where he is on the 5 hryvnia bill, which is worth about $0.20 USD), and as a murderous, if not genocidal, scumbag by Jews. If you’re looking for an unbiased account of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, I’m not the person to ask, since I usually have to stop myself from spitting when I hear his name.[18] Property management is easier when you’re literate and numerate, and Jews were usually both, while also being explicitly limited in potential growth of social status.[19] The term dates back to at least the mid-eighteenth century.[20] See The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt.[21] Something similar also happened with the Armenians. The Armenian Genocide did not begin purely because of the subsequent resentment, but it only could have occurred under those circumstances.[22] Not that this has usually happened in large-scale communist revolutions. Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and Paris during the Commune are examples of how this can work, but the GULAG, Cultural Revolution, and Kampuchean Killing Fields are bloody examples of this theory not being remotely adopted in practice.[23] This is why the "ironic antisemitism" on display in such forums as 4chan is something to be taken seriously. As genuine antisemitism is often couched in ironic terms, "joking" antisemitism, regardless of what the denizens of those forums might claim, is essentially identical to it.[24] Motion picture production, for example, was considered most disreputable in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Jews entered the business because they could do so free of discrimination, and founded most of the major Hollywood studios in the process. This, of course, was warped by the antisemite into "the Jews control the media."

The Income Tax’s Chennai Investigation Unit’s report having more than 200 pages about former Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s family and especially son Karti and his companies huge assets in more than 14 countries are now out in the public domain. Recently some portion of this sensitive report was exposed in public by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy in a press conference. Many media houses whose owners are friendly and in collusion with Chidambaram tried to black out the news.In the interest of public, we are producing the entire data of assets and bank accounts found in the joint raid of Income Tax and Enforcement Directorate.21 foreign bank accounts by Karti and his companies in Metro Bank in UK, 4 accounts in OCBC in Singapore in the name of Advantage Strategic Consulting Pte Ltd, the controversial company caught in kickbacks in Aircel-Maxis scam, 2 banks in Spain namely Sabadell Atlantico, La Caxia Bank, HSBC UK, Barclays Bank in Monaco, Marseille BNP Paribas in France, UBS in Switzerland etc.The Income Tax which seized hard disks from Karti’s companies found that P Chidambaram, wife Nalini Chidambaram, son Karti and his wife Srinidhi jointly purchased a property and a big palatial house in Cambridge in UK. As per the Income tax seized documents, the property bought by Chidambaram and family is: 5, Holben Close, Cambridge, CB237AQ. This huge property and home was purchased from Edmund Suley Holt and Heather Holt and the money was transacted from Karti’s personal account in London’s Metro Bank account number: 16714313. Chidambaram never declared this property in any of his mandatory affidavits as Member of Parliament (MP) or Minister. Chidambaram in his affidavit to Rajya Sabha in May 2016 declared only 1/3rd portion of the property as wife Nalini’s property. He also under-invoiced the value of this property of his wife’s share at just Rs.1.55 crores, while UK’s real estate websites estimate this property in Cambridge to be worth more than Rs.85 crores.Karti’s Advantage Strategic Consulting Private Limited ‘s Singapore company’s bank accounts to buy properties in UK like purchase of 88 acres farm house known as Surridge Farm in Somerset, UK. The land value shown in the registry is one million pounds.Another property in Cambridge is at Ceres, 29, Meade House at Cambridge.Chidambaram’s son Karti has built a massive empire in different parts of the world by making investments in real estate and engaging in other business activities in London, Dubai, South Africa, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, British Virgin Island, France, USA, Switzerland, Greece and Spain. Most of the purchases happened during the period 2006 to 2014 when Chidambaram was Finance Minister and Home Minister. The probe agencies estimate these assets across the world are expected to be more than Three Billion Dollars.Karti’s Singapore-based firm had acquired majority shares of a big resort in Sri Lanka, known as Lanka Fortune Residencies. This company owns the prestigious resorts ‘The Waterfront’, ‘Weligama Bay Resort’ and Emerald Bay Hotel.Karti’s Singapore firm routed money via Dubai to acquire three farms and vineyards in South Africa, identified as Rowey Farm in Grabouw, Cape Orchards and Vineyards Private Limited, and Zandvliet Enterprises, a wine and stud farm in Ashton.The Dubai-based Desert Dunes Properties Ltd has also investment in Karti’s Singapore-based company Advantage. The probes have unearthed a money trail of 1.7 million Singapore Dollars between these firms. Another Dubai-based company, Pearl Dubai FX LLC, also had financial transaction with Advantage. This shows that Karti linked firms have offices and assets in UAE also.The Advantage’s Ceres, 29, Meade House had entered into joint ventures with the Philippines-based companies to obtain a franchise team of International Premier Tennis League (Asia). The Philippine firms, which were engaged in joint ventures with the Karti-controlled company, are SM Arena Complex Corporation, Sports Entertainment Events Management Inc.The Advantage had also had financial transactions with another real estate company in Singapore known as Real Beyond Pte. Ltd. having three subsidiaries in Malaysia. The investigation has unearthed that these transactions led to 16 land purchases in Thailand.The Advantage’s Singapore unit has set up a firm in British Virgin Island (BVI), namely Somerset Surridge Ltd. Advantage also invested 400,000 Singapore dollars in another BVI firm known as Full Innovations Ltd. It also has financial dealing with Geben Trading Limited in BVI and offices in Switzerland. This firm’s major transactions were through the famous Swiss Bank, namely UBS. The investigators got proofs of transactions in Dollars and Euro. The Advantage also has transaction of five million Singapore dollars with another firm in Singapore, namely Unison Global Investment Ltd.The Karti-controlled company in Singapore entered into joint ventures with Gravitas Investments, Match Point International Tennis Events to buy a franchise Tennis team called ‘Manila Mavericks’. This deal was worth of 12 million US dollars and the money was paid in 10 installments.Karti’s Singapore company also acquired a residential flat in Malaysia worth 1.9 million Malaysian Ringgits from a firm called Peninsular Smart. The probe team also found some agreement papers which shows that the Advantage holds franchisees of Café’ Coffee Day in some locations in Malaysia. The investigators have found several transactions to Karti’s Singapore firm with Malaysian companies. Malaysia is the head quarters of telecom giant Maxis which acquired Aircel in 2006. The IT and ED officers seized payment details amounting to more than Rs.30 crore in foreign currencies.The Advantage in Singapore also opened a subsidiary firm in Barcelona in Spain known as Advantage Estrategia Esportiva SLU in August 2012. This is a sports academy having four acres with seven tennis courts in Spain.Karti-linked Singapore firm has also one million US dollar investment in a company in France known as Pampelonn Organisation. The Advantage also has transactions with a Greek firm known as Pisani John Sakellarios in Athens.Karti’s firm Advantage Strategic Consulting Private Limited (ASCPL) had transactions with Aircel Televenutres, DCB Client, Diageo Scotland Limited, Katra Group, Sri Lanka Export Development Board, Unifi Wealth Management Ltd, VST Tillers Tractors, Carlton Trading Company, Claris Life Sciences’, ITC Centre, Best Land Realty Limited, Essar Steel Limited, Gokul Builders and Estates, S Kumar, INX Media, Reflections, Thiagarajar Mills Private Limited, Saksoft, EL Forge Limited.The Income Tax which seized hard disks from Karti’s companies also found that Karti used to get huge money as kickbacks in several Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) deals pending with father former Finance Minister P Chidambaram.On Sept 22, 2008, ASCPL received Rs.35 Lakh from INX Media (now known as News X TV Channel), which applied for FIPB clearance of 220 million dollar during the period. Same day another Rs.60 Lakh was paid from INX Media to Northstar Software Solutions Pvt Ltd. Major shares of this Northstar Software Solutions Pvt Ltd controlled by C B N Reddy, who is a Benami and Director of ASCPL and its Singapore subsidiary also. On Sept 24, 2008 another tranche of 20,000 Dollars were paid to ASCPL’s Singapore subsidiary by INX Media.On Sept 26, 2008, ASCPL had a money transaction of 50,000 dollars with Geben Trading Limited in Athens in Greece. This company’s address is 4 Zaf.Matsa Street, 14564 Athens, Greence and incorporated in British Virgin Islands (BVI). The money transactions of ASCPL also show to Geben Trading’s bank account in UBS, Geneva in Switzerland. The emails of banking transaction details were marked to Karti also and documents shows about a business takeover of healthcare and rehabilitation centers in Greece. All these transactions happened during the INX Media’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) approvals for 220 million dollar were pending with Karti’s father Finance Minister P Chidambaram. In short, the murder accused Peter and Indrani Mukherjea who sold their INX Media paid around 9 crores rupees to Karti linked firms for FIPB clearance.In August 2008, Karti’s Singapore company got 60 lakh shares in the media firm Network 18’s London based company Artevea Digital UK This deal happened when Network 18 applied for a series of FIPB clearances, when Chidambaram was the Finance Minister. This led to around 25 crores kickback for processing the FIPB clearance.The documents unearthed by Income Tax shows that ASCPL received money from many companies when their FDI investment files were with FIPB and Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) during Chidambaram’s tenure as Finance Minister. The companies which transferred money to Karti’s ASCPL are Claris Life Sciences, Diageo Scotland Limited which acquired fugitive Vijay Mallya’s UB Spirits, Katra Group, Arcelor Mittal linked Saksoft, Reflections belong to Spark Capital Advisory Private Limited. As per the Income Tax Analysis Report, all these deals involve around Rs. 500 crores kickback to Karti linked companies for necessary FIPB and CCEA clearances during Chidambaram’s period in Finance Ministry.The documents seized from the raid also show that ASCPL received money from Best Land Realty, when the company got a Rs.304 crore loan from Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) Banks.In a bizarre incident, the British company Diageo Scotland Limited which acquired fugitive Vijay Mallya’s UB Spirits even paid 15,000 dollars as Service Charges to Karti’s ASCPL for fixing appointments with then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Finance Minister Chidambaram. Diageo’s emails thank Karti for fixing appointment of company owner Lord Blyth with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Finance Minister Chidambaram. The thanking email also attached the 15,000 dollar pay out receipt as Service Charges for fixing appointments with PM and FM. This is a clear case of abuse of power initiating case under Prevention of Corruption Act.Another clear case of favoritism to son’s company by abusing power by Chidambaram is – In September 2006, Russia’s National Industrial Bank (Nazprom) appoints Karti’s ASCPL as Business Consultant for their Joint Venture with Indian Overseas Bank. The documents seized by Income Tax included ASCPL’s agreement with Russian Bank Nazprom and Nazprom’s series of communications with IOB including the meetings in Chennai. The emails show that in each transactions with the Russian bank and PSU IOB, Karti’s ASCPL minted money in the form of consultancy. The Russian Bank’s agreement says Karti’s ASCPL’s Singapore subsidiary will get 5% as commission with all transactions with Indian Overseas Bank, apart from the initial 25,000 dollar processing fee.This is a clear case of abuse of power by Finance Minister Chidambaram to get a cut for son Karti’s company for each money transfer between PSU Bank IOB and Russian Bank Nazprom.Karti’s ASCPL also received huge money from a South African company Nicholas Stynes Associates Limited. This South African company was engaged in providing security to IPL Cricket and the money transactions with Karti’s company happened when Chidambaram was Home Minister.The documents also show that ASCPL got huge money as commission from Allianze Securities for sale of NABARD Bonds when Chidambaram was Finance Minister.The money was paid to Finance Minister Chidambaram from Karti’s Meltrack Ltd in relation to sale of shares and selling of huge tract of land in Mysore to VST Tillers & Tractors Limited. The land was mortgaged to Union Bank of India. P Chidambaram was shown as unsecured creditor to Meltrack Limited.A very interesting thing in all Karti companies including ASCPL – there are five common Directors like C B N Reddy, Bhaskar Raman, Mohanan Rajesh, Ravi Viswanathan and V Padma. The Income Tax found that all these five persons have entered into a curious WILL that they owe all properties and assets to Karti or his daughter Aditi in consideration of respect and love to P Chidambaram! This shows that these five persons are nothing but Benamis of Karti and P Chidambaram.*This is arguably one of the largest catch of black money in India from A Politician’s Family.