Kenneth Roth has picked the three winners from the nine finalists:

1. Top Quark, $500: Kenan Malik, Assimilation vs. Multiculturism
   
2. Strange Quark, $200: Xavier Marquez, The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm
   
3. Charm Quark, $100: Omar Ali, Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…
   

Here is what Ken had to say about them:

It was a pleasure to read an extraordinary group of essays, but it was difficult to rank them, since all deserve recognition. Still, in my view, three essays stand out, and even suggest an ordering:

I give the top prize to Pandaemonium: Assimilation vs. Multiculturism. It takes on a timely, important and difficult topic—how should European nations adjust to their increasingly diverse societies, particularly their growing numbers of Muslims? The essay elegantly contrasts British multiculturism and French assimlationism, but instead of finding one superior, it sees each as flawed, though in different ways. Its critiques are clear and astute, and instead of stopping there, it goes on to prescribe an approach of “lived diversity” rather than treating people by rigid categories, and encourages a revival of civil society organizations that cross ethnic and religious boundaries. European (and other) leaders would do well to read the article and learn from it.

The second prize goes to Abandoned Footnotes: The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm. After placing the Saudi monarchy in a global perspective of other monarchies and family dynasties, it insightfully analyzes the workings of this complex family business: how it chooses the CEO aka king, how it curtails any penchant to excessive reform or divisive politicking, how it keeps in touch with popular sentiments without such dangerous institutions as elections or a free press, and how it manages to keep the vast number of competing princes feeling they have more to gain from upholding the family business than from the fratricide common to other monarchies. I left with a far better understanding of how this remarkably resilient institution has managed to weather the difficult political currents shaking the region.

The third prize goes to Brown Pundits: Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…. It focuses mainly on Pakistan's blasphemy laws, which have been the source of executions, lynching, and long jail sentences, often against seemingly arbitrary victims, usually religious minorities. The article begins by placing these laws in context: far worse than both the relatively constrained laws left by British colonialists and the superficially comparable laws maintained elsewhere to defend other religions. The article is at its most perceptive in explaining why, despite the increasingly global conversation permitted by the Internet, which would seem to make acceptance of “blasphemous” statements an unavoidable necessity, powerful interests in Pakistan are pushing to maintain the blasphemy prohibition, whether as a tool to suppress “uppity” minorities or as a way to discourage possible secularist rapprochement with India that might threaten the rationale for the military's budget and prerogatives.

My thanks to 3QD for giving me the honor of serving as judge. And, foremost, my gratitude to these and the many other writers who make 3QD such an essential stop for any serious reader on the Web.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (remember, you must claim the money within one month from today—just send me an email). And feel free, in fact we encourage you, to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Many thanks also, of course, to Ken Roth for doing the final judging and for his liking of 3QD.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by me, Sughra Raza, and Carla Goller. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Frances Stark. Pull After Push, 2010.

Paint, printed matter, linen tape, stickers on panel

More here, and here.

Tim Walker in The Independent:

It sounds like the set-up for a joke: what does Mel Brooks have in common with Audrey Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg and Sir John Gielgud? But the punchline is deadly serious: they’re all among just a dozen show-business professionals ever to have achieved Egot status, single-handedly winning all four major American entertainment awards: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. Brooks – actor, director, writer, producer, songwriter – is perhaps best known for the run of classic comedies he made between the 1960s and 1980s, from The Producers to Spaceballs. With his 1974 spoof Western, Blazing Saddles, he perfected the parody genre. The following year, Playboy magazine heralded a new boom in movie comedy, and described Brooks as “one of the very few movie-makers since Charlie Chaplin who is unarguably a comic genius”.

He has also produced several straight-faced features, including The Elephant Man, which was awarded the Bafta for Best Film in 1981. (Does that make him a “Begot”?) Yet he started his comedy career in stand-up, and now, at 88, it is the stage to which he has returned. On Sunday, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, Brooks will perform his first, and probably his last, UK one-man show, an “introspective retrospective” reflecting on his life and career, with jokes. Theatre promoter Delfont Mackintosh has been criticised for charging more than £500 for stalls seats at Brooks’s show, the most expensive ticket ever for a West End performance. Several US stars, such as Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta, have similarly waxed nostalgic on the British stage in recent years. But Brooks has a longer and more varied history than any of them, which is perhaps why he can command such a high price to hear it.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Terry Pinkard in 3:AM magazine:

3:AM: You’re a leading expert on German Idealism, Hegel and their legacies. You think the context out of which all this happened is important don’t you – the fact that that there wasn’t really a Germany when it all started, the aftermath of the Seven Year War was something that shaped the development of this movement (and earlier, the Thirty Years War and the treaty of Westphalia etc). Could you perhaps sketch out what was most salient about the situation out of which these philosophical ideas emerged.

TP: Well, there’s lots going on there, but here are some highlights. Germany after 1648 was highly fragmented, and it was a place where, although the grip of the old regime was firmly in place, the mores of the people were changing rapidly, so there was a real and obvious gap between theory and practice. The way some began to think of it, “Germany” seemed to resemble more the plurality of ancient Greek states united only by a common culture, unlike its big neighbor, France. Furthermore, one of the very few all-German institutions in fragmented and still highly localized Germany was the German professor, since the professors went to wherever the jobs were. You thus had conceptually ambitious people armed with a certain authority with some of them thinking of themselves, however vaguely, as the new Greeks in a situation in which the gap between subjective life and social rules was deeply felt. That was a combustible mixture. Once you stirred the Scottish Enlightenment into the mix, as Kant did, the octane level of the coming conceptual explosion got raised even higher. Likewise, for those growing up in Württemberg, with its leanings toward France, the Kantian philosophy’s obvious debt to Rousseau was a plus. The arrival of the young Goethe on the scene with the Sorrows of Young Werther was a sign to those younger Germans that the times, they were indeed changing. The mixture created by all of these things managed to form an ignitable background for philosophy, especially Kant’s, to take the lead. With the French Revolution in 1789, the combustible mixture in German intellectual life exploded. Those things coming together set the stage for a certain discovery, as we could call it, of spontaneity and self-determination. And here we are, still living in that backwash.

More here.

Franco Moretti in NLR:

When György Lukács is still mentioned nowadays in connection with the study of the novel, it is either for The Theory of the Novel, composed between 1914 and 1916, or for The Historical Novel, written exactly twenty years later. Either, or: because the two books couldn’t be more different. The Historical Novel is a very good book—a very useful book—written by a serious Marxist professor. The Theory is not useful at all. It is an ‘attempt’ [ein Versuch], declares the subtitle; but ‘Essay’ would be more to the point. The essay: the ‘ironic’ form, where ‘the critic is always talking about the ultimate questions of life’, Lukács had already written in Soul and Forms (1911), but ‘in such a tone, as if it were just a matter of paintings or books’. And in fact, whenever the Theorytalks about the ‘novel’, the reader senses that—through the oblique refraction of ‘books’—something much more momentous is at stake. But what? What is the ‘ultimate question’ that the Theory is trying to address?

An initial answer could be: it is the transformation of social existence—at some unspecified moment between Dante and Cervantes—into a ‘world of convention’ whose abnormality Lukács tries to capture through the metaphor of the ‘second nature’. Nature, because the ‘all-embracing power’ of convention subjects the social world to ‘laws’ whose ‘regularity’ can only be compared to that of physical nature: ‘strict’ laws, ‘without exception or choice’, that are—this is the decisive passage—‘the embodiment of recognized but meaningless necessities’.

Meaningless necessities. That is to say: in second nature, ‘meaning’ is present only in the recollection of its loss. It’s the disenchantment of the world first diagnosed by German culture around 1800. When the earth was still ‘the abode of the Gods’, wrote Novalis in the fifth Hymn to the Night:

Rivers and trees,
Flowers and beasts
Had human meaning

But now ‘the Gods have vanished’—they live ‘in another world’, echoes Hölderlin’s Bread and Wine, written in the same years—and ‘human meaning’ has vanished with them. ‘Lonely and lifeless / Stood nature’, continues Novalis:

Deprived of its soul by the violent number
And the iron chain
Laws had come into being
And in concepts
As in dust and draught
Disintegrated the unmeasurable flowering
Of manysided life.

More here.

Anne Chemin in The Guardian (Photograph: Camille Tokerud/Getty):

Over the past 10 years the offices of France’s National Institute for Demographic Studies (Ined) have seen a steady stream of Korean policymakers and Japanese academics, determined to crack the mystery of French fertility. Scientists present their birthrate graphs and explain the broad lines of French public policy. “In the past four or five years we’ve had over 10 Korean delegations,” says demographer Olivier Thévenon with a smile. Haunted by the threat of population decline, these Asian experts are keen to understand the recipe that has given France the highest fertility rate in Europe, alongside Ireland.

Since the early 2000s France has consistently topped European rankings. After two decades of decline, in the 1970s-80s, the fertility rate started picking up again in the late 1990s. Since then the country has registered scores just short of the mythical threshold of 2.1 children per woman, which would secure a steady population. Its fertility rate in 2014 was 2.01. “For the economy Germany is the strong man of Europe, but when it comes to demography France is our fecund woman,” says demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences and emeritus professor of Brussels Free University.

Much of central and southern Europe has subsided into a strange demographic winter. Fifty years after the postwar baby boom, the fertility rate in the European Union has fallen in recent years to 1.58 live births per woman. Year in, year out the Mediterranean countries contradict the clichés about Roman Catholic culture. In recent years Spain, Portugal and Italy have witnessed a dramatic fall in the number of births (registering 1.4 or even 1.3 births per woman). German-speaking countries – Germany and Austria – have fared scarcely any better, much as most former eastern bloc countries – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Policymakers all over Europe are concerned about such decline.

Yet there is nothing mysterious about the approach that is working in both France and Scandinavia. It combines the idea of a modern family based on gender equality and powerful government policies. “Nowadays, both ingredients are needed to sustain the population,” Lesthaeghe asserts. “At first sight it seems a simple recipe, but it’s far from easy to put into practice: it takes a lot of time to design and establish a new family model.”

More here.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Wall Street Journal:

“Islam’s borders are bloody,” wrote the late political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996, “and so are its innards.” Nearly 20 years later, Huntington looks more right than ever before. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims. In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide. The lion’s share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.

Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.

When I assert this, I do not mean that Islamic belief makes all Muslims violent. This is manifestly not the case: There are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.

It is not just al Qaeda and Islamic State that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is Pakistan, where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labeled as blasphemy and punishable by death. It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are outlawed and where beheadings are a legitimate form of punishment. It is Iran, where stoning is an acceptable punishment and homosexuals are hanged for their “crime.”

More here.

John Bohannon in Science:

On 28 December 2014, Valentino Gantz and Ethan Bier checked on the fruit flies that had just hatched in their lab at the University of California (UC), San Diego. By the classic rules of Mendelian genetics, only one out of four of the newborn flies should have shown the effects of the mutation their mothers carried, an X-linked recessive trait that causes a loss of pigmentation similar to albinism. Instead, nothing but pale yellow flies kept emerging. “We were stunned,” says Bier, who is Gantz’s Ph.D. adviser. “It was like the sun rose in the west rather than the east.” They hammered out a paper and submitted it to 
Science 3 days later.

In the study, published online this week, Gantz and Bier report that the introduced mutation disabled both normal copies of a pigmentation gene on the fruit fly chromosomes, transmitting itself to the next generation with 97% efficiency—a near-complete invasion of the genome. The secret of its success: an increasingly popular gene-editing toolkit called CRISPR, which Gantz and Bier adapted to give the mutation an overwhelming advantage. The technique is the latest—and some say, most impressive—example of gene drive: biasing inheritance to spread a gene rapidly through a population, or even an entire species. At this level of efficiency, a single mosquito equipped with a parasite-blocking gene could in theory spread malaria resistance through an entire breeding population in a single season (see diagram).

More here.

Birds in the Garden of the Cairo Marriott

And you, little birds, are waiters but not smiling,
hopping at the sad indignity of that man
(he said Detriot was home) on his second
giant burger; with your quick in-and-out
besieging tables sweetened by the sugared sky
of Cairo, you mock the nicest men with napkins
on their shoulders — would they snap at scraps? —
and your big rivals, we’d call them crows
but they are dignity itself in brown tuxedos,
peering from high perches of a Disney Ramasseum,
speaking faultless American forever,
they must be Prefects of the Underworld!

The little dust we drop our crumbs upon
seethes like the Red Sea Crossing — if this is history
asks a powerless nation, can mere birds
patrol the valley of the Kings each morning?
Three sparrows who have ĥotep somewhere
in their suffix drop beside our just uncovered
breakfast tomb: all food, they say,
is like another wave upon the Nile, a dream
worth sleeping for — the gods immured in obelisks
consider everything; their High Priests clad in aprons
are opening umbrellas as the sun begins
to climb above the masts of potted palms.

.
by Peter Porter
from Poetry Review, 98:2
Publisher: Poetry Review, London, 2008

Andreas Wagner in Aeon:

How do random DNA changes lead to innovation? Darwin’s concept of natural selection, although crucial to understand evolution, doesn’t help much. The thing is, selection can only spread innovations that already exist. The botanist Hugo de Vries said it best in 1905: ‘Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’ (Half a century earlier, Darwin had already admitted that calling variations random is just another way of admitting that we don’t know their origins.) A metaphor might help to clarify the problem. Imagine a giant library of books containing all possible sequences of letters in the alphabet. Such a library would be huge beyond imagination, and most of its texts would of course be pure gibberish. But some would contain islands of intelligibility – a word here, a Haiku there – in a sea of random letters. Still others would tell all stories real and imagined: not only Dickens’s Oliver Twist or Goethe’s Faust, but all possible novels and dramas, the biography of every single human, true and false histories of the world, of other worlds as yet unseen, and so on. Some texts would include descriptions of countless technological innovations, from the wheel to the steam engine to the transistor – including countless innovations yet to be imagined. But the chances of choosing such a valuable tome by chance are minuscule.

A protein is a volume in a library just like this, written in a 20-letter alphabet of amino acids. And while protein texts might not be as long as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, their total number is still astonishing. For example, a library of every possible amino acid string that is 500 letters long would contain more than 10⁶⁰⁰ texts – a one with 600 trailing zeros. That vastly outnumbers the atoms in the visible universe. The library is a giant space of the possible, encoding all the proteins that could be useful to life. But here’s the thing: evolution can’t simply look up the chemicals it needs in a giant catalogue. No, it has to inch its way painstakingly along the stacks. Imagine a crowd of browsers – each one representing an entire familial line – who must blindly explore the library, step by random step. This sounds like a party game, but there’s a grisly twist. A mutation that compromises an essential protein such as haemoglobin is punishable by death. On that ill-fated volume, the bloodline ends.

The challenge, then, is to land on texts that work.

More here.

Claire Cameron in Nautilus (image The Discussion by Harry Wilson Watrous):

A Language Where Time Flows East to West

Stanford linguist Lera Boroditsky and Berkeley’s Alice Gaby studied the language Kuuk Thaayorre, spoken by the Pormpuraaw people, also in Queensland, Australia. Like Guugu Ymithirr, it uses cardinal directions to express locations. But Boroditsky and Gaby found that in Kuuk Thaayorre, this also affected a speaker’s interpretation of of time.

In a series of experiments, the linguists had Kuuk Thaayorre speakers put a sequential series of cards in order—one which showed a man aging, another of a crocodile growing, and of a person eating a banana. The speakers were sat at tables during the experiment, once facing south, and another time facing north. Regardless of which direction they were facing, all speakers arranged the cards in order from east to west—the same direction the sun’s path takes through the sky as the day passes. By contrast, English speakers doing the same experiment always arranged the cards from left to right—the direction in which we read.

For the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, the passage of time was intimately tied to the cardinal directions. “We never told anyone which direction they were facing,” wrote Boroditsky. “The Kuuk Thaayorre knew that already and spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”

More here.

Franҫois Kiper in the LA Review of Books:

PARENTS AND CHILDREN of the 1990s will remember the PBS “edutainment” television series The Magic School Bus. For many children of this generation, the animated series melded fact and fantasy to distill the complexity of biological, physical, and chemical processes into a fun, microcosmic world explored by a group of elementary school students.

The Emmy-winning cable news show VICE, now into its third season on HBO, likewise often conflates the distinction between reality and the imagination to entertain and (at least professedly) to instruct its viewers. While not animated, VICE simplifies the confusing, overlapping worlds of domestic and foreign affairs by reducing such vexing problems as terrorism, genocide, and poverty to sensational, 30-minute films unfolding in real time, shot from a direct, firsthand perspective. The show’s cameras breathlessly follow its correspondents — “boots on the ground” in the parlance of series creator, frontman, and Svengali Shane Smith, who has a penchant for overblown militaristic rhetoric — as their unmediated, first person accounts of world-historical issues invariably place them in the thick of perilous circumstances, often amidst whirring gunfire and exploding tear gas canisters. VICE’s swashbuckling, immersive eyewitness mode of staging the news plunges the viewer into the action in the manner of a first person video game. Not surprisingly, then, every VICE episode is an engrossing and exhilarating cinematic experience, which is certainly a testament to the talent of the series’ production staff. Even the most cynically guarded TV viewer would be hard-pressed to refrain from marveling at — and temporarily living vicariously through — the exploits of VICE’s correspondents.

However, if we are all students riding on the adrenaline-fueled magic school bus piloted by Smith, executive producer Bill Maher, and chief creative guru Eddy Moretti, perhaps it’s time to stop and question where they are taking us now that the show is into its third season.

Whereas the Magic School Bus series never purported to represent “hard science,” nor held any pretense to usurping the field of science from scientists, VICE CEO Shane Smith makes no bones about his show being equal to the task of “heavy” and “serious” journalism. Despite the show’s disregard (or ignorance) of fundamental journalistic ethics — such as the hazards of participant observation — Smith unabashedly proclaims that VICE is “blazing a new trail” at the forefront of “a changing of the guard in media.”

More here.

Aatish Taseer in the NYT (image Damien Poulain):

India has had languages of the elite in the past — Sanskrit was one, Persian another. They were needed to unite an entity more linguistically diverse than Europe. But there was perhaps never one that bore such an uneasy relationship to the languages operating beneath it, a relationship the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock has described as “a scorched-earth policy,” as English.

India, if it is to speak to itself, will always need a lingua franca. But English, which re-enacts the colonial relationship, placing certain Indians in a position the British once occupied, does more than that. It has created a linguistic line as unbreachable as the color line once was in the United States.

Two students I met in Varanasi encapsulated India’s tortured relationship with English. Both attended Benares Hindu University, which was founded in the early 20th century to unite traditional Indian learning with modern education from the West. Both students were symbols of the failure of this enterprise.

One of them, Vishal Singh, was a popular basketball player, devoted to Michael Jordan and Enfield motorbikes. He was two-thirds of the way through a degree in social sciences — some mixture of psychology, sociology and history. All of his classes were in English, but, over the course of a six-week friendship, I discovered to my horror that he couldn’t string together a sentence in the language. He was the first to admit that his education was a sham, but English was power. And if, in three years, he learned no more than a handful of basic sentences in English, he was still in a better position than the other student I came to know.

That student, Sheshamuni Shukla, studied classical grammar in the Sanskrit department. He had spent over a decade mastering rules of grammar set down by the ancient Indian grammarians some 2,000 years before. He spoke pure and beautiful Hindi; in another country, a number of careers might have been open to him. But in India, without English, he was powerless. Despite his grand education, he would be lucky to end up as a teacher or a clerk in a government office.

More here.

Michael Ruse in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

You have got a fever, your body aches, and you feel dreadful. What should you do? The traditional answer is: “Take two aspirin, drink lots of fluids, get to bed and call me in the morning if you don’t feel better.” Could it be that this is just the wrong advice? That the last thing you should do is reduce your temperature with aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever? Is it, to use a phrase, nature’s way of fighting illness? This is very much the position of a small group of biologists and medics who are pushing what has come to be known as “evolutionary medicine.” Crystallized about 20 years ago by a book – Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine – authored by the distinguished evolutionist George C. Williams and the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, it claims that the force that caused us all, Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, does not care about human happiness or even human health per se. What it cares about is survival and reproduction and it is prepared to go to great measures to achieve its ends. Too long has medicine focused only on proximate causes, the physiological and other reasons for ill health. What we must do also is look at end causes, what Aristotle calls final causes and what we might call ultimate causes, and put our bodies and their functioning in perspective – a perspective that in this day and age means Darwinian evolution brought about by natural selection. If selection found that fevers increase life expectancies and consequent reproductive success, then bring them on, no matter how unpleasant they may be. That evolution is important is probably accepted by every medical person today in some respects.

…However, going back further, fascinatingly and paradoxically, the person most responsible for keeping evolution out of medical education was Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s self-styled “bulldog.” Huxley was a fanatical evolutionist and preached it publicly on every occasion. But he was never that keen on natural selection and thought overall that evolution was too speculative – and of no real value – to biological education. As I discovered by looking at student notebooks, in a 165-lecture course on biology, he would give less than half a lecture to evolution, and selection got all of 10 minutes. As a master academic politician and system builder – and as one who incidentally started life with a medical degree – Huxley saw the medics as the source of support for his science and his students. After the total muck up in the Crimean War, when most soldiers died of disease and dirtiness and not battle, the medical profession realized that the time had come to stop killing and start curing. Huxley gave them the perfect solution. “I will educate people in basic biology and then you can take them and turn them into doctors.”

More here.

Miranda Seymour in The Telegraph:

In June 1857, following a series of seemingly unrelated uprisings by disaffected Indian soldiers in the employ of their British overlords, Cawnpore was still under siege and Delhi had been taken by the mutineers. Up in the Punjab, one of the most ferocious of the British Generals, John Nicholson, had frightened potential rebels into subjection by blasting 40 live mutineers out of the mouths of loaded cannons, before marching his modest force of 600 cavalry and 2,400 infantry down the Grand Trunk Road to the rescue of Delhi.

Theo Metcalfe, one of the closely linked tribe of ancestors around whom Ferdinand Mount builds his enthralling account of India under a century of British rule, had narrowly escaped being massacred in Delhi before, breathing fire and baying for blood, he joined Nicholson's avenging army. The self-styled Delhi Field Force were taking a brief afternoon rest when a tiny severed foot was delivered into their camp. The foot, still neatly buttoned into its shoe, was that of a small white child. Nobody knew who had brought it, but nine local villagers, following the evening parade, were hanged in savage retaliation from a single tree.Nicholson and Metcalfe were united by their fury against the natives whom they had already begun to slaughter with incontinent zeal. What neither man fully grasped was the real significance of that curious token. What it indicated, Mount suggests, was an unequivocal determination on the part of the so-called mutineers to exterminate an alien and conquering race. Mincing no words, Mount describes the chief intention of the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Independence, as it's known in India) as British genocide.

More here.