“The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism”

 This interview “The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism” really spoke to me: 

"the primary impulse behind the book was really to put an end to this horrible loneliness that I felt, along with many other people, a kind of desolation induced by the fact that, you know, powerful people, powerful politicians in democracies, journalists, intellectuals were either silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or, even worse, vehemently supporting it. So, I think, you know, it forced many of us to reexamining not just sort of narratives of Middle Eastern history or Israeli history or Palestinian history, but a kind of broader history of Western supremacism, of decolonization."

One feels a loneliness and desolation at the silence of Western white friends who have not uttered a peep against the Genocide. It exposes the hollowness of an international life with international careers, international education, international colleagues and friends with whom one doesn't share any soul, any solidarity, any politics, any common consciousness.

This sense of betrayal, this sense of desolation has to be acknowledged but also resisted, I suppose. We have to continue to bear witness to the atrocities and this world order.

Some more quotes:

So, I think, for many people in the West, who have been absorbed with a very different narrative — first of all, the narrative of the Cold War, the narrative of the end of history, the narrative of American unipolar dominance — decolonization still comes as a kind of news, or they confuse it with people asking for decolonizing knowledge in the United States or decolonizing educational syllabuses. So, I think there’s a very broad confusion about this world.

But what it really signifies is greater political, intellectual assertiveness and a very fierce desire to not live in a world where racial privilege, most specifically white privilege, orders and forces a global hierarchy. You know, you can see this very clearly in sort of South African president a few days ago making a speech and saying, “We will not be bullied.”

And you can read the whole transcript here: “The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism”: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/13/pankaj_mishra_world_after_gaza .

By the way, I was lucky enough to see a conversation between Pankaj Mishra and Mohsin Hamid in Lahore at the Lahore Lit Fest a couple years ago.