One of the major justifications for British colonialism was its ‘civilising mission’ in the non-western world and the humanity has paid the price for it. Today, the ‘civilised’ West is the benchmark for everything that is called ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’.
In a scathing attack against the dominant narratives of the West, renowned author Pankaj Mishra argues that the civilising mission of the liberal West didn’t end with colonialism and it’s only repackaged in our own times in the name of liberal democracy and free market economy.
The evangelical liberals forcefully argue that these values as the final form and norm of human existence. “The bards of a new universal liberal empire almost entirely suppressed Asian, African and Latin American voices”, Mishra says.
He says there are many more political and philosophical traditions we can learn from, but we will have to first break out of our intellectual captivity to Western political concepts and theories.
“What I didn’t realise until I started to inhabit the knowledge ecosystem of London and New York is how evasions and supressions had resulted, over time, in a massive store of defective knowledge about the West and the non-West alike” Mishra writes in his introduction to his latest book, ‘The bland fanatics. Liberals Race and Empire’.
Mishra is not great fan of the developed modern West. Much before the Covid-19 started devastating the world, in 2017, he prophetically wrote in his previous book, ‘The age of anger’ that, “After a long, equipoise since 1945, the old West-dominated world order is giving way to an apparent global disorder. The Anglo-America no longer confidentially produces, as it did for two centuries, the surplus of global history, and the people it once dominated now chafe against the norms and valuations produced by that history.”
Now, the coronavirus cruelly exposed the reality they had long concealed: heavily indebted states, bailed-out corporates, impoverished working classes, and eviscerated public health system. Anglo-American self-deceptions, which always exacted a high death toll abroad, have become mass-murderous at home; a blusteringly casual attitude to the pandemic has resulted in tens of thousands of premature deaths in Britain and United states, he writes.
Will the free market economy be replaced by the more authoritarian regimes in the lines of Xi Ping of China or a world order evolve based on more humane values and ethics that consider human beings needs many things that money can’t buy? Only times will tell.
The books is a collection of 16 essays by Mishra on various topics published in leading international publications during the past 10 years.
In an essay on intellectual Islamophobia, Mishra exposes these liberals’ deeply internalised prejudices against Islam and the Muslims which in turn become fodder to the growing tribe of Islamophobes in the West. Quoting prominent American columnist Christopher Caldwell, Mishra explains how these scholars churn out venomous literature to demonise Islam in the western world.
Caldwell writes, “Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today.” The constant scare-mongering about the ‘demographic time bomb’ is about a community which actually constitutes only 3-4% of EU’s total population of 493 million, Mishra writes.
Some of them even warn that Muslims are seducing white girls as part of a plot take over Britain. Caldwell goes on to say, “Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation.” The ‘liberal’ thinking doesn’t stop there. They even suggest a final solution to the growing Muslim problem in Europe. “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography — except thorough civil war. The Serbs figured that out — as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull them,” writes the Canadian journalist Mark Steys in his best-selling book ‘America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It’.
What is more striking is the similarity of this propaganda with their Hindu supremacist avatars in India. It’s not only their propaganda machines but the very character of these two are a very similar.
“The far-right is intellectually very deficient, and extremely insecure, though it enjoys political power everywhere, and when words fail its publicists, they are quick to resort to force and threats of force,” Mishra said in a recent interview.
The repeated lies of Love Jihad and Muslim appeasement and brutal attacks against Muslims and dalits in the name beef eating, stage-managed encounter killings and massacres are continuing unabated with the full support of the power that be. While dissenting voices are systematically being silenced, the victims of state repression and of fascist hooligans are being framed and shamed.
Most recently, the Supreme Court of India had to intervene to stop telecasting of Sudarshan News’s toxic show ‘Bindas Bol’. The channel portrayed the success of Muslim candidates in civil services as a jihadi conspiracy to infiltrate India’s civil services. The channel branded it as ‘UPSC Jihad’ claiming that all these students were funded by terror linked organisations.
A known critique of the right wing politics in India, Mishra reveals what actually prompted him to challenge the so called ‘liberal’ narratives.
“The brutal realities of India’s military occupation of Kashmir and the blatant falsehoods and deceptions that accompanied it forced me to revisit many of the old critiques of Western imperialism and its rhetoric of progress,” he writes.
And he believes, as he said in a recent interview, that the Hindu majoritarian state that we used to call the Indian republic has reached its perfect apotheosis in Ayodhya with the coronation of Narendra Modi as our first Hindu Samrat.