The letter "I" has no place among N, S, E, or W on the compass, apart from its presence in the form of a needle pointing to opposites. A brief study tour undertaken on my way back to Australia from last autumn's Social Contract Writers' Workshop in Washington, D.C., took me through the threshold of opposites to contrast Iceland with India. Some months of determined procrastination on my part have fortuitously led to the inclusion herein of recent events relating to India and Indians which have unfolded since my return home in mid-November, 1999.

In March of this year, Australia's Immigration (and Aboriginal Reconciliation) Minister Phillip Ruddock was on the end of some particularly partisan and uninformed criticism from Geneva-based U.N. Race Relations Thought Police. In his solid, polite rebuttal to these ignorant U.N. folk, intent on rushing into Australian domestic concerns where better-briefed angels would fear to tread, Ruddock mentioned the time he met the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had asked him how long he intended staying in India. Nine days, he replied, which Gandhi seemed to welcome, as she told him "Most people come for two and think they can write a book."(1) It is with India Gandhi's implied and valid caution to quick-trip book writers in mind that I dare to pen these few thoughts - and do happily swear never to expand them into a book.

A week in Iceland was a pleasurable tonic. Save for a very few monks and hermits from elsewhere, it was not peopled until Norsemen settled there in the late ninth century, bringing with them the then lingua franca of Scandinavia which is today recognized as Icelandic, the ancestor of all modern Scandinavian languages. They pioneered a form of democratic legislative assembly, the Althingi, in 930 AD, where settlement leaders from across Iceland (or Island as they appropriately spell it) would meet together in the open air, jamboree style, on the shores of a picturesque lake and where, ironically, modern Earth Sciences have identified the North American and European lithospheric or tectonic plates as meeting - hence the abundance of clean, cheap geothermal energy and the occasional volcanic problems. That Leif Ericsson "son of Iceland" first discovered 'Vinland', otherwise known as North America today, is well known in Iceland, if not elsewhere.

Today's Iceland is a small (little over 100,00 sq. km), homogeneous, scenic, prosperous, well-governed island nation in the North Atlantic where geographic constraints to growth have naturally sheltered the population (270,000 approximately) from the immigration/multicultural/multiracial problems which have been demographically building around Western civilization and elsewhere since the 1960s. Iceland runs no immigration program. From 1996 to 1999, they had accepted a total of 147 refugees, all from the Balkans - 70 Serbs, 77 Kosovars. They have for many years imported guest-working seasonal labor for the fish processing industry which is the country's most important economic earner. In years gone by, many young British, and some Australians among others, gained an admiration for Iceland as well as good wages while working these seasonal jobs. In more recent years, Poles and other Eastern Europeans have been predominant. Rumor has it that the Brits and Aussies were a much better cultural-ethnic fit than Eastern Europeans have proved to be so far.

Having visited continental Scandinavia back in the mid-l970s, I felt even more at home and relaxed in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, where about half the total population lives. One hundred yards down the street from my lodgings stood Kormāks and Skjaldor Men's Tailors and Clothing Store bearing witness to my own ancient Irish ancestors minor genetic contribution to the ongoing saga of this thousand-year-old civilizational jewel that is Iceland. No doubt they have their share of human and social frailties. They are not untouched by the array of unhealthy socio-cultural trends in evidence elsewhere not only in the west, but around the globe in the modern era. But what an uplifting experience it was to find in this people a general happiness and pride in their own history, language, literature, folkways and general culture. They have a profound sense of who they are.

"Diversity" is not a big issue in Iceland. There is no minority-driven guilt industry, immigration industry, multicultural industry, affirmative action, and quota or employment set-asides, which come with increasing diversity anywhere. India now has OBC ("Other Backward Castes") employment set-asides designed to overcome traditional cultural barriers. Regardless of the best intentions, OBC set-asides are becoming another source of grievance in the hearts of millions. Icelandic society is not overshadowed by the many and complex shades of diversity-driven anxiety and social divisiveness omnipresent throughout the West and elsewhere today. Icelanders are a polite, well-traveled and well-informed lot. There is no shortage of daily news/information flow covering all, including both the minutiae and the magnitude of ethnic, racial, and religious clashes from around the globe. Hence they are aware of mounting global unease from distant Japan to nearby Scandinavia and Britain in relation to immigration-induced multiculturalism and multiracialism. Icelanders today therefore view their island nation's geographic constraints as more of a blessing than did their ancestors. Academics and others I spoke to did not foresee any socio-political circumstances which could lead to change in their national demographic/racial profile, nor, I gathered, would such change be welcome. I deposited with the National Library in Reykjavik a copy of "Immigration and the Social Contract The Implosion of Western Societies," (Avebury 1996).

There is a socially conservative level-headedness about life in Iceland. It is a calmness, bordering on the boring, as some of Iceland's own social critics would affectionately term it, that with each generation bestows a continued inclusive benevolence of stability and a level of community contentment unknown and unimaginable by billions of people elsewhere in the world. As an Australian from another far-flung island nation state of breath-taking natural beauty, with relative tranquility and prosperity, founded and built by Europeans (whose demographic predominance is presently declining), I understand why Icelanders are always happy to return to their clean, quiet, safe and uncluttered northern roost after a trip nearly anywhere else. Many I spoke to viewed the rest of the world as exciting, but dauntingly crowded, complex, corrupt, chaotic, dangerous, dirty and environmentally degraded.

Though India is only a long day on a plane away from Iceland, it did seem like landing on another planet. Having studied and worked for two years in the Peoples Republic of China during the early 1980s, and traveled more widely and freely there than most were allowed at that time, I thought I'd had ample scope to observe what overpopulation and destitution meant. Out of 1.2 billion in all, 200 million Chinese are living in "total poverty."(2) China, however, did not prepare me for India, which has just reached the 1 billion mark and is due to exceed China's population in about 40 years' time.

Three weeks by bus, train, plane, rickshaw and foot through Mumbai (Bombay), Varanasi (Benares), New Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur, finishing with four days in Calcutta, was long enough to glimpse the famed decaying majesty of past eras still standing amid the swirling, churning hundreds of millions of mostly poor people. There is an educated, modestly well-off middle class of about 200 million (including a few million very wealthy), 500 million just getting by and 300 million in dire poverty. India has the world's fourth largest economy. On the back of the computer industry, places like Hyderabad reinvent themselves as "Cyberabad." Megabucks are being made by computer service companies with teams of low-wage Indian software engineers and data processors who perform contract work for scores of Fortune 500 companies, U.S. government departments, and perhaps for your local medical clinic's billing operations! So, not only will the current proposals to double H-lB visas for skilled I.T. workers lead to more Indian immigrants taking jobs in Silicon Valley, but more jobs can be double-clicked out of the country by U.S. employers to low wage destinations like Hyderabad. Welcome to www.globalization. Oh no!

Some successful economic reform in the early 1990s after decades of stagnation has contributed to India's enhanced perception of itself as an up-and-coming super cyber nuclear space-racing power with confidence. In a budget speech earlier this year, Indian Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha predicted an end to poverty in his country within a decade. This is a truly tall order for a country wherein the absolute numbers of people in poverty are admitted to be still growing, where today 300 million eat less than one adequate meal a day, and half the population is functionally illiterate. The courts are backlogged with 30 million cases and corruption at all levels of government is frankly admitted.(3) Add to the aforementioned a chronic housing shortage, expanding urban slums, problems of water shortage and quality, daily outages of electricity (for those who have access to it), woeful sewage inadequacies, grinding rural poverty, urban pollution and congestion of nightmarish proportions and you have a picture of why Professor Amitabh Kundu of the Center for the Study of Regional Development at Jawaharlal Nehru University says of so many millions that "... people are really living like animals."(4)

After 200 years of British administration, which ended in 1947, it is no surprise to find English language dailies throughout India. Predictably, the papers reveal the everyday local and national endeavors to organize and fund physical and bureaucratic infrastructure in order to feed, water, sewer, educate and usefully employ such a massive and growing population within a democratic framework. But there is also very frank reportage of the great complicating factor which too often retards these endeavors, i.e. the sheer burden and breadth of diversity both locally and nationally. There are 15 official languages in India, along with scores of others. Everyday life has long been wracked by interethnic, religious, caste, and gender violence, not every day everywhere, but every day the newspapers recount a tragic tale of communal strife from somewhere in India. Mahatma Gandhi's grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, is a distinguished historian and biographer. His latest book, Revenge and Reconciliation Understanding South Asian History, came out in November while I was in India. "It is a study of the revenge impulse in South Asia ..." He confronts the history and contemporaneity of intolerance and vengefulness in South Asia. It is his search for the historical roots of violence, starting from the classic text of the Mahabharata's conflict and revenge through to numerous questions relating to caste feuds, Hindu-Muslim relationships, etc."(5)

Pankaj Mishra is another Indian author who has recently written that "rural and semi-urban India is now full of disenfranchised restive people," and has identified their "free-floating rage" as the most sinister feature of contemporary India. At a recent reading in Melbourne of his novel The Romantics, some aspects of which portray a rather bleak view of modernizing India, and after lodgment of the usual flak-deflecting PC caveats (the evening was sponsored by Melbourne University's dogmatically pro-multicultural "Asialink" think-tank propaganda unit), he did at question time frankly acknowledge both diversity and population pressure as contributing factors to what he termed "the grueling realities of life in India."(6) And it's not as if ordinary Indians don't recognize the inherent problems naturally ensuing from excessive diversity. Nobody I spoke to anywhere in India, from any occupation or walk of life, of any ethnic, religious or caste background, wanted more diversity.

Suffice it to say that the specter of Christianity's influence, increasing due to years of well-funded missionary activity which culminated in the Pope's visit to India in November 1999, is viewed by many with foreboding. It produced in the media some blunt commentary about what these developments may mean for intercommunal harmony and for politics in a country where government is dominated by the Hindu nationalists. India is still struggling with the historical legacy of the foreign Moghul (Muslim) Empire which ruled India from the early 16th century and from whom the Brits finally took over administration in 1857. In many countries, after census time - when the national statistical ingredients on race, ethnicity and religion are rebaked into fresh pie charts by demographers - the politicians, bureaucrats and social science practitioners always ponder with apprehension not only the consequences of changed proportions of the major slices to each other, but they also ponder the future potential impact of previously insignificant but recently expanding minority slices. One of the differences between our governments and India's is that they expend effort and lives dousing the flames of extant diversity, while ours continue to import more diversity through unpopularly large and ethnically inappropriate immigration which is raising our social combustibility and testing our "tolerance."

On the sub-continent, tolerance is what prevails between tumults. It is a compromised reality under which an ever-present range of actual and potentially antagonistic forces slumber, with everyone knowing that any group striving for an ideal outcome on any issue of mutual concern may well spark havoc among them all. Tolerance, it seems, is a mandatory life sentence for all who live under diversity's expanding jurisdiction.

Our nightly TV world news has for decades been delivering to us the bad news on diverse societies. In recent times, academia has begun to investigate and quantify the downside of diversity for good governance.(7) Why is it then that Western governments and elites are still chanting the "diversity is wonderful" mantra, when the nightly news so repeatedly proves that it just ain't so? Part of the answer is cognitive dissonance in the minds of Western elites.

A clear example of this came to light during President Clinton's visit to India in March of this year. His address to a joint sitting of India's parliament was briefly reported on ABC Radio in Australia, wherein he at once expressed his sorrow and dismay about the massacre (widely thought to have been prompted by his visit) in the Pakistani/Indian-disputed territory of Kashmir, and then went on to comment favorably about India's cultural diversity. The Kashmir border problem goes back to Partition in 1947 when the sub-continent gained independence from Britain. It was partitioned along none-too-clear ethno-religious lines into India (majority Hindu) and Pakistan both East and West (majority Muslim) which triggered the biggest transmigration of modern times.(8) Millions of Muslims moved both east and west to the Pakistans, and likewise Hindus and others to India in between. The death and destruction was horrendous.(9) East Pakistan split from West Pakistan and became Bangladesh, an event which brought millions more refugees to already overcrowded Calcutta(10) where "the Left Front Government, which has been in power since 1977, still draws major support from the refugee community."(11)

Calcutta is the capital of India's West Bengal State and only a short distance east is the border with Bangladesh where "Operation Push Back" has been mounted by the Indian Border Security Force in an effort to control illegal immigration. Muslims are rounded up and evicted, their heads shaved and their transistor radios and other property taken from them as a lesson to others. A wire fence has been put up at the main points of entry along the 2000-kilometer border to stem the tide, and also to control smuggling. The issuance of identity cards to West Bengalis as a further control has been under consideration.(12)

Bangladesh consists of 125 million very poor people living on a vast delta, waiting for the next flood followed by famine. That Calcutta has been their destination of desperation speaks volumes for the future of both places. How strange then to read in The Times of India on the day of my departure (15 November, 1999) from India for Melbourne,

"Free migration of labor must be allowed", says Jethmalani, India's Minister for Law and Justice at a judicial symposium on refugee protection "The rich nations should change laws of migration...". He stressed the need for creating conditions conducive for the protection of refugees so that they could "lead a more dignified life in the country where they sought asylum" ....

"As a refugee, I myself had experienced the trauma and agony faced by refugees first during India's partition and a second time when I sought political asylum while trying to flee persecution during the Emergency in 1975..." "In this era of liberalization and global village, there should not only be free movement of capitalists(sic) but also free migration of labor...".

The article goes on to say that six South Asian countries had seen a large influx of population, none of them had signed the International Convention on Refugee Protection [1951] and the problem was dealt with on an ad hoc basis. Needless to say, Mr. Jethmalani's high-minded rhetoric was delivered at a United Nations-High Commissioner for Refugees co-hosted conference.

In the Guardian Weekly of February 10-16 this year, in an article titled "Global Warning," George Monbiot cuts straight to the chase

The effects of global warming are cruelly ironic the impact of fossil-fuel consumption will be most severe in regions where the least fuel has been consumed. Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming drier in East Africa droughts of the kind that used to strike every 40 years are arriving every four or five. On the Indian subcontinent, the great centers of population and food production, the valleys of the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Indus are all fed by Himalayan glaciers. These are retreating so fast that the rivers may dry up by 2040. The results will be catastrophic. Bangladesh will be hit twice as the people of the river deltas are driven off their land by rising sea levels. Environmental refugees already outnumber those displaced by conflict. Last month, Sojeeda Choudhury, the Bangladeshi environment minister, told the BBC that climate change would leave her country with 20 million environmental refugees. Rich nations would have to "rethink their immigration policies." The distinction between political and economic refugees has always been an artificial one poor regions of the world remain so as a result of the policies of the rich. But in this case, the West's moral responsibility is incontestable every time someone in the West turns on a kettle, he or she is helping to flood Bangladesh. Global warming requires an ethical framework that classifies hitherto innocent actions as deadly. There is nowhere else for the displaced people of Bangladesh or sub-Saharan Africa to go ... If the West doesn't let them in, they will die, and Westerners, the consumers of fossil fuels will be responsible.(13) If global warming is not contained, the West will face a choice of a refugee crisis of unimaginable proportions, or direct complicity in crimes against humanity. The alternative is to reduce carbon consump-tion by 90 percent over the next ten years.

The article finishes by outlining some "radical" measures needed for this reduction to be achieved. This is but the latest restatement of such a future scenario. In my view, the outline has already started in terms of future environmental crises and possible displacement of tens to hundreds of millions, but it is the placement of guilt(14) - "the white man's burden," and the fanciful notion that such massive numbers could be somehow relocated in the "rich" countries of "the West" without "the West" environmentally, culturally and racially wiping itself off the face of the earth a la "The Camp of the Saints." The proposition of collective Western (read white) guilt and responsibility for most if not all of the world's problems, as put by George Monboit and his ilk, goes something like this since it was a few British foundry forging folk in Ironbridge (Telford, UK) who in 1709 started stoking their iron with coke and thereby accelerating the Industrial Revolution, which led to rapid technological advances in all fields of human endeavor covering improved agriculture, public health, transport, and communications, which led to population growth, global exploration, establishment of empires, expansion of trade, colonialism, more population growth, resource exploitation, which led to all races taking to as much of the above to the best (and worst) of their abilities and circumstances, which led to global capitalism, marxism, revolutions, wars and consumerism, all of which have over centuries cumulatively contributed to climate change and the future dry-up of the Ganges, etc, thus his reasoning goes, we Westerners alive today are collectively responsible for the world's woes and are morally obliged, at any cost to our own future survival, to save everyone everywhere from any life-threatening circumstances which are in any way connected (as they inevitably are) with any of the above complex of intertwining historical processes which, of course, were under the exclusive control of no one peoples' administration at any time.

Perhaps Monboit et al should be pointing their accusatory fingers of guilt at Saddam Hussein's Iraqi people, for as far as we know the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia were the progenitors of civilization (while sitting atop all that fossil fuel), and no doubt had an early formative influence on what later became Judaism, which begat Christianity and Islam, all of which have begat too much triumph and trauma in the rest of the world to reiterate here. However, could Iraq handle, as penance for its past, a few million refugees from Bangladesh, or is diversity in the Middle Eastern property market a little over-heated already?

What is to be learned? Where is the path forward? On race, ethnicity and religion, the verdicts of world history and global current affairs coincide the more diverse the nation state, the harder it is to govern. On apportioning guilt for climate change don't. There is no answer, but start with the Sumerians anyway, and do what you can to tread more lightly on the environment. On future mass movements of environ-mental refugees pray that it doesn't happen, but start stiffening backbones and borders by openly talking about such future possibilities and treat your federal representative to a fact-finding tour in Calcutta.

P.S. As I write, a coup is unfolding in Fiji. The previous one in 1987 was about the same issue, i.e. indigenous Fijians (51 percent) wish to maintain political dominance of their South Pacific archipelago against Indian Fijians (44 percent) whose ancestors were imported a hundred years ago by the British to work sugar cane plantations. The rest of the story you can guess. The first elected Indian Fijian prime minister has been ousted after one year in office. Indian Fijians have been coming into Australia since the first coup. Now thousands more are thinking of doing the same thing, and I can't help wishing they'd prefer to go back to India.

1. "Ruddock and Australia in the Dock" and "Cabinet Rebuff for Partisan U.N. Bodies" by Simon Mann and Tony Wright, The Age, Melbourne, 25 March 2000.

2. "200 Million Chinese Live in Total Poverty" by John Shauble, The Age, Melbourne, 24 March 2000.

3. According to a U.N.-funded Human Development Report on South Asia in early November, 1999.

While corruption in rich rapidly growing countries may be tolerable, though reprehensible, in poverty stricken South Asia, it is political dynamite when the majority of the population cannot meet their basic needs ... Thus corruption in South Asia does not lead to simply cabinet portfolio shifts or newspaper headlines, but to massive human deprivation ... The report covers India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal ... The 208-page report focused on corruption as one of the most damaging consequences of poor governance ... South Asia is facing a crisis of governance which, if unchecked, could halt the region's democratic progress and economic and social well-being of its teeming millions ... The signs of crisis are everywhere ... All of the nations face the pernicious evils - endemic corruption, social exclusion, inefficient civil services ... Evidence of corruption is widespread in reduced availability and increased cost of basic social services, in allocation of resources for mega projects, and in the breakdown of rule of law ... Combating corruption in the region is not just about punishing corrupt politicians and bureaucrats but about saving lives ... Corrupt money has wings not wheels and is smuggled abroad to safe havens ... Corruption often leads to promotion not prison.

According to a report in Melbourne Herald Sun, 24 September, 1998, Berlin-based Transparency International surveyed 85 countries on a "corruption perception index." From best to worst, Denmark ranked top with Finland 2, Sweden 3, Iceland 5, Norway 8, Australia 11, USA equal 17th, India 66, Pakistan 71, Vietnam 74, and Nigeria 81. The biggest regulator in the biggest financial market is Arthur Levitt, head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Since 1998, Levitt has repeatedly warned of trickery and illusion, nods and winks, and wishful thinking all now being practiced by "the Big Five" global accounting firms in their financial reporting. He said recently, "I am worried, however, that a gradual but perceptible erosion in the quality of this reporting may be undermining the systemic integrity of our market place ... overriding long-established precepts of financial reporting and of ethical restraint ... threatening investor confidence and potentially weakening America's brand in the global arena" because the Big Five are getting distracted from their traditional work of accounting and auditing by the much more lucrative world of management consulting for the firms they audit. Levitt is ever so politely talking about developing corruption of "international best practice" accounting. Looking at the latest stats on obesity around the developed world, however, it seems clear that corruption in our financial system does not have the direct impact on our citizens as that of the sub-continent reported above.

4. "India Rises for Richer and Poorer" by Christopher Kremmer, The Age, Melbourne, 25 March 2000.

5. Book reviews in Calcutta Telegraph 12 November, 1999, The Asian Age, 14 November 1999.

6. "On the Road to Benares" by Helen Anderson, Weekend Australian Book Review 13-14 May 2000. Also personal communication with Mishra at his book-reading in Melbourne 25 May 2000. I have purposely not outlined daily privations of the poor in India, "the grueling realities of life in India" as Mishra terms them, but there are no better treatments of these than told by LaPierre and Thomas in their books cited at 10 and 11 hereunder.

7. See "Putting the Good in Good Government" by Richard Morin, Washington Post, 1 November 1998, which cites researchers at Harvard and University of Chicago from a paper they prepared for the National Bureau of Economic Research on the downside of diversity for good governance "... ethno-linguistically heterogeneous countries (those with lots of ethnic groups) don't seem to be as well governed as those with much less diversity. That's because competing ethnic groups too often waste their energy and squander their country's resources trying to dominate and sometimes exterminate their rivals." Also see Alesina, Baquir, and Easterly 1999 "Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions" Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (November) pages 1243 to 1284.

8. Partition was really Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations writ large and early (reviewed The Social Contract, Vol. VII, No. 2, Winter 96/97) in which Huntington actually mentioned Raspail's The Camp of the Saints and cited The Social Contract.

9. See Freedom at Midnight by Collins and Lapierre, Simon & Schuster 1975.

10. See City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre, Doubleday, 1988, for a sympathetic and excruciatingly vivid and detailed look at street and slum life in Calcutta. It should be read as a prelude to Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, to which an edition of TSC (Vol. V, No. 2) was devoted.

11. See Calcutta: The Human Face of Poverty, p.42 by Frederic C. Thomas, Penguin India, 1999. Thomas is a research scholar at the Center for South Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. His book is up to date and concise at 189 pages, but packed with historical detail and sociological research from many Indians who tell it like it is, linking Calcutta's sorry condition to successive overwhelming waves of refugees from rural poverty in India as well as from Bangladesh since partition.

12. Ibid. p.143.

13. I would argue diminished responsibility here on the following grounds It is not as if the environmental lobby or the scientific research community have been sitting on their hands ignoring this issue for the last 30 years. There are many strategies and environmentally friendly energy schemes that could theoretically be in play today but for the way global finance is structured and but for the influence of powerful multinational cartels who profit handsomely from the status quo and who can lean ever more heavily on national administrations in the age of globalization and shrinking government. Ditto for Mr. and Mrs. Sixpack, who may well be already convinced that it is in the world's and their best interests to modify lifestyle and consumption patterns in order to ameliorate climate change; however, their capacity to influence such lofty international affairs is negligible, and they'll want to be assured that they and theirs will not be wiped out by millions of hungry refugees should international scheduling of solutions go a little out of whack with what is humanly possible. Democracy can become fragile when survival is at stake.

14. South African political commentator and author Ivor Benson in "The New Scramble for Africa" (1966) had the following to say on the issue of guilt when comparing colonizing peoples in Africa

They are not afflicted (the Portuguese), like so many people in the English-speaking world, with what de Quincy, the essayist, identified as a streak of Anglo-Saxon morbidity. Others have called it "the Anglo-Saxon neurosis." It could more accurately be described, perhaps, as an incipient schizophrenia, the main symptom of it being confused susceptibility to moral misgivings and self-accusation, an easily aroused feeling of guilt. Soften up the Anglo-Saxon with a few sob stories, persuade him that he is not being quite fair, that he is not being a little gentleman, and he is ready to have his throat cut. His richest virtues as a social animal, his feeling of care and consideration for others, his tolerance, his ethical flair- all these are turned against his breast and made into the means of his undoing. It is this morbid streak in the Anglo-Saxons and other peoples of Northwestern Europe which has become the Achilles' heel of their defense system and which has made propaganda by far the most deadly weapon that can be used against them.