Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past
The essays in “Bland Fanatics” trace today’s crises to a long
history of violent colonial oppression.
New Republic, Kanishk Tharoor
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/kanishk-tharoor>/February 22, 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY LAYLAH AMARCHIH
In July 2017, Donald Trump gave a speech in Warsaw that seemed, at the
time, to herald a new age. In remarks dredged from the imagination of
adviser Steve Bannon, the president drew a rhetorical line in the sand
and enlisted his host—the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist Polish
President Andrzej Duda—in an epochal fight. “I declare today for the
world to hear,” Trump said, as if he were standing behind ramparts and
not a podium, “that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will
prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph.”
Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire
by Pankaj Mishra
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9780374293314>
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pp., $27.00
Trump struck the pose of a defender of an embattled cause, invoking
Poland’s history of repeated invasion by foreign aggressors. But who was
this paladin of the West going to protect civilization from? The danger
of “radical Islamic terrorism” merited one mention, as did the scourge
of “government bureaucracy” (never underestimate the apocalyptic peril
of regulation); for the most part, the speech was fairly vague in
pinpointing the enemy. “This continent no longer confronts the specter
of communism,” Trump said, “but today we’re in the West, and we have to
say there are dire threats to our security and to our way of life.” Less
than 0.1 percent of Poland’s population is Muslim, and the country has
yet to experience an Islamist terrorist attack. But the exact nature of
the menace mattered far less than the fact that a menace existed—and
that Trump and other right-wing leaders had the courage to do something
about it.
The speech alarmed many liberal critics back in the United States, who
suspected with reason that the president’s rhetoric signaled
encouragement to white supremacists (the infamous, murderous neo-Nazi
rally in Charlottesville would occur later that summer). Writing in/The
Atlantic/, Peter Beinartinsisted
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/trump-speech-poland/532866/>that
invocations of civilization were coded appeals to racial identity. He
was surely right. But for all Trump’s strident language and its dark
echoes, his address did not constitute some kind of norm-shattering
departure from the rhetoric of presidents past. As the conservative
writer Marc Thiessen pointed out in/The Washington Post/, U.S.
presidents ofboth parties
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-defense-of-western-civilization-is-not-alt-right/2017/07/12/aea2afe6-6650-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html>all
the way from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton had dutifully invoked the
sanctity of Western civilization. Clinton, basking in the heady
certainty that followed the end of the Cold War, said in 1994 that
“Western civilization was the greatest of all, and America was the best
expression of Western civilization.”
One of the unfortunate temptations of the Trump era has been the rush to
find radical breaks with the past where, in truth, the lines of
continuity are strong. The themes of Trump’s speech were already well
circulated among the Anglo-American elite, whether in the work of the
political scientist Samuel Huntington or in the pages of the British
political magazine/The Spectator/. “Invocations of the free world and
talk of Western values came into vogue during the Cold War, and were
meant to assert Western democracy’s superiority over Communism,” the
left-wing Indian critic Pankaj Mishra wrote forBloomberg.com
<https://www.bloombergquint.com/view/2017/07/07/trump-s-talk-of-western-values-is-bogus>at
the time. “They were never very convincing even back then: The free
world often supported brutal dictatorships, quickly discarding its
values when it felt the need.” The president only did what so many
previous European and American leaders have done, draping themselves in
the mantle of culture to inveigh against an amorphous other. Appeals to
Western values “invoke grand moral and political communities,” Mishra
wrote. “But these imagined communities appear cohesive only so long as
they can clearly identify an antagonist.”
Much of Mishra’s career has been spent rewriting that imagined
“antagonist” into the history of liberalism. In/Bland Fanatics/, his
latest collection of essays, Mishra notes that “racial exclusion has
long been central to liberal universalism.” The 16 essays in the
collection touch on numerous subjects—including modern reckonings with
slavery and race in the United States, the life and legacy of the
nineteenth-century Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen, the meaning of
World War I, and the fascist mysticism of the popular Canadian
psychology professor Jordan Peterson—but together advance Mishra’s
rereading of the history of the twentieth century. The world looks
rather different if you see the central event of the past 100 years not
as the contest between Western liberalism and its antonyms, but rather,
as Mishra does, the tumultuous process of decolonization, which reshaped
the lives of most people on the planet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For nearly three decades, Mishra has skewered the pieties of politicians
and intellectuals in the Anglophone world (including India, which boasts
more English speakers than the United Kingdom), while also bringing his
spirited attention to the histories and imaginations of people outside
circles of wealth and power. The scales first fell from his eyes during
his travels and reporting in Kashmir in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In the disputed Indian-administered territory, he saw firsthand the
collision between India’s pluralist liberal democracy—its avowed
commitment to democratic norms, individual rights, and
multiculturalism—and the reality of military occupation. Indian apologia
for abuses in Kashmir, he writes, “prepared me for the spectacle of a
liberal intelligentsia cheerleading the war for ‘human rights’ in Iraq,
with the kind of humanitarian rhetoric about freedom, democracy and
progress that was originally heard from European imperialists in the
nineteenth century.” The remit of Mishra’s work has grown steadily wider
over the decades, from an early focus on the dreams and catastrophes of
small-town India, to a thoughtful exploration of colonial-era Asian
intellectual history in the excellent/From the Ruins of Empire/
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781250037718>(2012), to the sweeping
global jurisdiction of his recent books, which directly confront the
international order made by the United Kingdom and the United States.
He is steeped in an Indian (and broadly non-Western) intellectual
tradition of anti-colonialism that has long highlighted the gulf between
the West’s espoused beliefs and the reality of its conduct. The
institutions that put nineteenth-century Western powers in a position to
rule over vast swaths of the earth—nationalism, centralized
bureaucracies, efficient armies, and the capacity to mobilize vast
resources—had little to do with the rights of the individual. In the
eyes of many non-Westerners, Mishra writes, “liberalism seemed
attractive largely because it promised to advance the urgent project of
state-led modernization”—a modernization that would better protect them
from the threat of ostensibly liberal empires. The
early–twentieth-century Chinese thinker Yan Fu claimed that the genius
of the West lay in its ability to channel “individual energy into
national strength.” Imperial expansion throughout this period (including
that by the Japanese) enacted this very tension, with strong states
merrily quashing individuals in the service of colonial fantasy.
And then there was the blood. On the centenary of the end of World War
I, Mishra lamented how “the war has been remembered as a great rupture
in modern Western civilization, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly
civilized European powers sleepwalked into after the ‘long peace’ of the
nineteenth century.” That reading forgets the apocalyptic violence
Western powers brought to other parts of the world in the years before
the war. Mishra sketches a sample accounting of the grisly toll of
empire: the 200,000 Filipinos the United States killed during its
colonial wars in the early twentieth century (in which 26 of 30 U.S.
generals had also served in wars against Native Americans), how the
Germans slaughtered 88 percent of the Herero people in Southern Africa,
and the eight million people who died in Belgian-administered Congo. (He
might have mentioned the tens of millions of Indians lost to famines
under British colonial rule, death at a scale that dwarfs the number of
Ukrainians killed by Stalin’s Holodomor in the 1930s.) A tenuous peace
held between the great powers during the interwar period, but the
carnage continued elsewhere. Arthur Harris, the British air force
officer who led the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, laid
waste to northern Iraq in 1924. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real
bombing means,” Harris proclaimed in a Royal Air Force report at the
time. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can
be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”
Europeans and North Americans are learning more about this gruesome
past, but the history of the West’s dealings with the rest remains
largely submerged in a gray zone, allowed little of the harsh light cast
on the traditional villains of the modern era (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and
so on). Western colonial abuses are still treated as a footnote, a
sideshow to the main action of the twentieth century: the confrontation
between liberalism and authoritarianism that emerged through the world
wars and the Cold War. And they must be treated in this way for the rest
of the narrative to cohere and for the binary between liberty and
tyranny to take shape.
Mishra insists that liberalism cannot so easily shed this baggage. The
chaos, violence, and snarling ideologies of imperial rule in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America fed directly into the wars that would dismember
and reshape the world. Colonies, Mishra writes, were “the crucible where
the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal twentieth-century wars—racial
extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian
lives—were first forged.” The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt
recognized this in her 1951 classic/The Origins of Totalitarianism/,
where she described how Europeans reordered “humanity into master and
slave races” in ways that prefigured the decimation of the world wars
and the Holocaust. But as Mishra points out, anti-colonial thinkers in
Asia such as the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao and the Indian writer
Aurobindo Ghose had already come to that conclusion decades before
Arendt, keenly seeing how the West’s brutality overseas now consumed it
in the inferno of World War I. “The experience of mass death and
destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first
widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were
forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure was
systematically destroyed, and entire populations were eliminated with
the help of up-to-date bureaucracies,” Mishra writes. “Europe’s
equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.”
That dynamic persisted into the Cold War, as the contest between the
West and the Soviet Union—between the enlightened liberal world and the
fallen authoritarian one—obscured the widespread violence perpetrated on
behalf of liberalism in the twentieth century, in killing fields as
varied as Indonesia, Congo, and Nicaragua. And it continued—even
accelerated—after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the United
States embraced a far more militarized foreign policy, leading to
nearly200 military interventions
<https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-10-15/nonintervention-delusion>since
1992 (the United States conducted around 50 military interventions
between the end of World War II and 1991). Thanks to both education and
cultural insularity, people in the West (and in the United States in
particular) often struggle to see just how entangled they are in the
world. The greatest contribution of Mishra’s work is its indefatigable
insistence that places long considered marginal belong in the foreground
of modern political history. He isn’t just interested in righting the
balance between the West and the rest; he questions whether one can even
separate the two.
What distinguishes Mishra’s energetic and often pugilistic writing is
not necessarily the point of its attack—the withering, if familiar,
broadsides against the callous actions of Western powers and
postcolonial states—but rather its angle. Mishra sees the present as a
historian; the tremors on the surface reveal deep currents. In an
especially merciless piece on Brexit, for instance, he compares
Britain’s departure from the European Union to the country’s retreat
from empire and consequent loss of identity, showing how the ineptitude
of colonial-era Britons abroad now defines the split from Europe. “The
malign incompetence of the Brexiteers,” he writes, “was precisely
prefigured during Britain’s exit from India in 1947, most strikingly in
the lack of orderly preparation for it.” The same class of posh “eternal
schoolboys” that crafted the disastrous partition of India—resulting in
upwards of a million deaths—now aspired to cleave the country from
Europe. “Ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable
exit wounds once inflicted by Britain’s bumbling chumocrats on millions
of Asians and Africans.”
In other essays, Mishra reminds readers that/The Economist/supported the
Confederacy in the nineteenth century and hailed the rise of Mussolini
in the twentieth. (The magazine would also offer itsbacking
<https://www.economist.com/leaders/2003/02/20/why-war-would-be-justified>to
the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.) And he recounts the bigotry that
underlay the internationalism of President Woodrow Wilson (a legacy that
recently saw the president’s name scrubbed from Princeton’s School of
Public and International Affairs) as a harbinger for future
interventions in the name of liberal values./The New Republic/, Mishra
notes acidly, described President George W. Bush in buoyant terms after
U.S. troops entered Iraq as “the most Wilsonian president since Wilson
himself.”
Instinctively a comparativist, Mishra traces connections and patterns
across time and space. The title essay of/Bland Fanatics/, for example,
draws the astute parallel between the experiences of industrialization
in many Asian countries after World War II and of industrialization in
Europe in the nineteenth century. Many of liberalism’s
evangelists—figures Mishra calls “bland fanatics,” borrowing from the
American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr—in the twentieth century imagined
its spread as preordained. But Mishra insists that liberalism was always
highly contingent; liberal political systems have very rarely emerged in
sync with liberal economic ones. The secret of the success of the poster
children of liberalism—the United Kingdom and the United States—was the
“surplus value and resources” won through “imperial domination.” Other
states that lacked those imperial advantages had to pursue different
paths. In much of nineteenth-century Europe and in postwar Asia,
modernization and state-building occurred largely under autocratic
conditions, guarded by robust protectionist policies, and with little
protection of personal liberties. Mishra is fond of this sort of deft
grafting of two distinct histories, offering a revisionist understanding
of both, a reminder that liberalism’s ostensible successes often owed
very little to liberalism.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Moral clarity about the colonial era still inspires blowback from those
unwilling to tolerate significant revisions to the record. In the United
Kingdom, Conservative politicians have spoken about the ills of
“critical race theory” and rallied around figures such as Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, who is venerated for defeating the Nazis and regarded
as the consummate exemplar of Anglo-Saxon resolve, but whose hagiography
many Britons no longer accept. American conservatives have developed a
fixation with/The New York Times/’1619 Project
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html>,
which reframes U.S. history in terms of slavery and racial injustice,
identifying the arrival of slave ships in 1619 as the country’s original
sin. Trump tried to harness unease with the project during his
unsuccessful reelection bid (pledging to launch a “1776 Commission”
counter-Reformation), while Rod Dreher, writing in the/New York Post/,
went so far as to cite Arendt (a darling of opinion writers of almost
every political stripe) when he blamed the 1619 Project for the imminent
arrival of “totalitarian tyranny.”
One imagines that these reactionaries will supply Mishra with a good
deal of fuel for future columns. But it is unlikely that he will find as
consummate an adversary as the British historian Niall Ferguson, the
subject of the opening essay of/Bland Fanatics/. Few figures concentrate
Mishra’s ire better than Ferguson—an apologist for British empire, a
zealous supporter of the 2003 Iraq War, a proponent of the untrammeled
spread of free markets, and a salesman of repackaged notions of Western
cultural superiority. Theirfeud
<https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/harvard-professors-fight-over-bad-book-review-goes-legal/334958/>in
the pages of the/London Review of Books/
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man>a
decade ago helped shoot Mishra to greater prominence and further banish
Ferguson from the circles of polite liberal conversation.
The spat with Ferguson points to a potentially uncomfortable fact for
Mishra, who styles himself as an outsider speaking truth to an
insensible and irredeemable establishment. In some respects, he is
winning; his views are sliding into the mainstream. Ferguson may hop
from one comfortable sinecure to another, but he no longer has the
influence and ubiquity he enjoyed at the turn of the century, when he
supplied the gloss of epochal purpose to Bush’s diabolical invasion of
Iraq. Indeed, Americans have far less appetite now for the liberal
interventionism of that era. Condemning the Iraq War has become a rote
piety of American political life. Proponents of retrenchment and critics
of U.S. hegemony enjoy more space both in prestige publications such
as/The New York Times/and/Foreign Affairs/and in conversations on the
Beltway. An American politician of the conviction and popularity of the
democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have been
unimaginable 20 years ago, when Mishra was clarifying his doubts about
liberalism. Even heterodox ideas about the economy, such as modern
monetary theory, are winning more adherents. A new generation of writers
and scholars—the political theorist Adom Getachew, the legal scholar
Samuel Moyn, and historians Stephen Wertheim, Quinn Slobodian, and Priya
Satia, to name just a few—manages with greater patience and detail than
Mishra to pick apart the assumptions and certainties of the liberal order.
But what Mishra’s essays lack in granularity they make up in vigor and
scope. He challenges his readers to broaden their frames of reference,
to see their worlds as inextricable from those of others. No other
writer in the English language can offer such a bracing, global
understanding of the specious conceits of our times.
Kanishk Tharoor is a Senior Editor at Foreign Affairs, the author of the
short-story collection Swimmer Among the Stars, and the presenter of the
BBC radio series Museum of Lost Objects.
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