Page:Plunder (Perlman).djvu/11

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5

NATHURAM

Maybe you are right, Krishna. I can still remember my father's happiness when he would weave--he told stories his grandfather had told him. Sure it was better cloth than any we see today. But the British merchants came and sold their cloth so cheaply--they never told us they had to change thousands of men into animals to sell their manufactured cloth so cheap.

Now I don't have anything against Natives. They've got the same I.Q.'s we've got. But there's no use denying they're underdeveloped is there?

All over the world they live in backward regimes--more backward than anything we've ever known. If it wasn't for our know-how and our aid they'd go on being backward for centuries.

We never knew we were expected to buy only things made in England until there was nothing else to buy. So my father lost his vitality and no longer told any stories. They bought him out for almost nothing--generations of weavers sold for three shillings!

We go there and build factories, mine resources, grow food--we bring economic growth into regions where there was nothing, nothing at all!

HAROLD

Father, don't you see it's just this self-righteousness that breeds disaffection?

The old man thought he'd lost his craft, betrayed his tradition--and he went begging. And so I went begging. My brother had a plot of land and couldn't pay the taxes. Money-lenders took his house

DARIUS STARK

Now don't you go shooting your mouth off, Harold. Do you think you see the world as I've seen it? Who do you ever talk to but the officials--the natives who wear the same clothes we do,