Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past – The New Republic

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 Europes brutal twentieth-century warsracial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian liveswere 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 Wests 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. Europes 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 Unionbetween the enlightened liberal world and the fallen authoritarian oneobscured the widespread violence perpetrated on behalf of liberalism in the twentieth century, in killing fields as varied as Indonesia, Congo, and Nicaragua. And it continuedeven acceleratedafter the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the United States embraced a far more militarized foreign policy, leading to nearly 200 military interventions 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 Mishras work is its indefatigable insistence that places long considered marginal belong in the foreground of modern political history. He isnt just interested in righting the balance between the West and the rest; he questions whether one can even separate the two.

What distinguishes Mishras energetic and often pugilistic writing is not necessarily the point of its attackthe withering, if familiar, broadsides against the callous actions of Western powers and postcolonial statesbut 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 Britains departure from the European Union to the countrys 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 Britains 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 Indiaresulting in upwards of a million deathsnow aspired to cleave the country from Europe. Ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable exit wounds once inflicted by Britains 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 its backing 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 presidents name scrubbed from Princetons 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.

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Pankaj Mishra's Reckoning With Liberalism's Bloody Past - The New Republic