Fanatic Hysteria

According to Mishra the West gave the world colonialism, destruction and slavery as half a millennium of dominance is now closing and is sinking under the weight of its greed and hypocrisy.

Decades of violence and chaos have generated a political and intellectual hysteria ranging from imperial atavism to paranoia about invading or hectically breeding Muslim hordes that has affected even the most intelligent Anglo-America.

Mishra traces “Anglo-American delusions” from the age of empire, via  the Cold War, to neoliberalism an dour embattled present and targets the western elites who read and write for the Economist,  New York Times and the Financial Times. “The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers”, Pankaj Mishra argues  in a 2017 essay on Brexit titled “Bumbling Chumocrats”.

Mishra explains how most of us are captives to a class and race nostalgia  that mourns for days when Britannia rule the waves, and America’s global writ ran unopposed.

The changing world has turned upside down the isolated and vain chattering class.

It is this class of “bland fanatics”  has sought to reinvent the west as benign global force and exposed the “smelly past of ethnocide, slavery and racism and the on going corporate venality – from their perfumed notion of Anglo-American superiority.

 

Mishra highlights how the language of imperialism remains the language that is deployed by both left and right today, and how Asian and other voices are erased from or suppressed within global political discourse as it is reported in liberal as well as illiberal discussion in the West. “Sane Thinking”, in relation to the first in a 2017 article titled “The Religion of Whiteness”, would required examination of the history and stubborn persistence of racist imperialism.

 

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in the US and the UK, Mishra’s essay on Naill Ferguson was redeployed in a newsletter sent out by London Review of Books.

We need to rethink out past in order to reshape our future.

Bland Fanatics: The Afterlives of Empire by Pankaj Mishra, Verso £14.99, 224 pages.