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--On the 1919 Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, in Amritsar IT is 80 years since my countrymen committed the vile massacre of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children at Jallianwala Bagh.I feel, more strongly than I can say, ashamed of England and what was done there in the name of the Empire. I wish I could tell every person in India how intensely I hate the injustice surrounding the entire British Raj, the false, ugly notion, upon which the British Empire was based, that Englishmen were more civilised, more intelligent, simply better than the people of India — whose culture was already over 4000 years old when the first British ships arrived. I am so sorry it ever happened. On April 13, 1919, General Reginald Dyer ordered his men to open fire on unarmed civilians, gathered peacefully in religious celebration and in protest at the harsh recently-imposed law outlawing assemblies. Nearly 400 of them were killed and thousands were wounded. Many jumped into the well and died rather than face the bullets. Had General Dyer been able to bring armoured cars into the compound the number of persons killed and wounded would have been even higher. He then issued an order forbidding anyone to help the poor, wounded, dying victims. How could anyone have done this? How could British soldiers in India agree afterwards, in smug racist terms —overheard by Jawaharlal Nehru — that this atrocity would "teach the bloody browns a lesson." And while things have changed, why have British officials in our time, as happened around the time of the Queen’s visit to Amritsar in 1997, had the gall to quibble about the number of people who were murdered that day instead of issuing a simple, honest, heartfelt apology? I want people to know what I am so grateful to have learned, that the cause of all human cruelty, including the brutality of General Dyer and the British Raj, has been understood at last. Eli Siegel, the great American scholar and poet who founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, explained where evil begins. He saw that there is a constant debate in the mind of every person about how to see the world, including other people — with respect or contempt. He identified contempt as the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world," and he showed that it is as ordinary as a husband thinking he knows that his wife will say next, and is behind one person looking down on someone else because of their accent. It is the cause of war. "As soon as you have contempt," he wrote, "as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person." (James and the Children, Definition Press, New York, 1968, p.55). This attitude is the cause of all cruelty, from British Imperialism to the bullying going on in a school playground this afternoon. Before a fist is raised or a gun fired in anger, contempt has taken the inner life of another person and made it nothing. I am sure that Dyer, who was born and raised in India, and spent years living there, did not see the Indian people as having the same kind of reality as his own thoughts and feelings. He saw them with contempt, as servants inferiors, to be commanded for their own good. This is shown graphically in another order he gave at Amritsar, to have every Indian person crawl past the place where a British woman was assaulted.If he had seen the people of Amritsar as having the same depth as himself — and I wish so much that he had — he could never have done what he did. Growing up in England, I didn’t see other people as having the fulness I had, either. I hated cruelty when I saw it, but I didn’t see that the way I robbed other people of meaning made me cruel myself. I got into a lot of fights with other boys at the boarding school I attended, and when a young man from the Indian subcontinent began to attend this all-white school, I made fun of him and saw him as different. This was contempt; it affected how I saw people, near and far, and the world itself. Go to Part Two

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