by CHRIS HEDGES
Essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra discusses the lesser-known genocidal escapades of Western governments and his latest book, The World After Gaza.
?The Holocaust is the quintessential example of human evil for people in the West. In the rest of the world, especially in the Global South, the atrocity of the Holocaust — genocide — has had a closer proximity both in time and place. Colonialism in Africa, destructive wars in Asia and most recently, genocide in the Middle East, have shaped the lives of billions of people.
On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his latest book, The World After Gaza.
Mishra argues that the shifting power dynamics in the world means the Global South’s narrative on atrocity can no longer be ignored and the genocide in Gaza is the current crux of the issue.
“Large parts of the world have a cultural memory, historical memory of the atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by Western powers. And that has actually gone to the making of their collective identity. And that is how they see themselves in the world,” Mishra tells Hedges.
Mishra explains that in the case of Israel, Zionist leaders weaponize this narrative by tying the safety and existence of the state of Israel to the defense against the evils of the Holocaust. In other words, the Zionist state exploits the suffering of millions for the benefit of the powerful.
“The words of politicians like Netanyahu, the rhetoric of people like Joe Biden insisting that no Jewish person in the world is safe if Israel is not safe, consistently connecting the fate of millions of Jews living outside of Israel to the fate of the state of Israel, I cannot think of anything more antisemitic. And yet these people keep doing it, endangering Jewish populations elsewhere,” Mishra says.
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Diego Ramos
Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript: Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges Pankaj Mishra in his latest book, The World After Gaza, argues that the postwar global order was shaped in response to the Nazi Holocaust. In the West the Shoah was the benchmark for atrocity, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory serves to justify Israel’s settler colonial, apartheid state, as well as sanctify Jewish victimhood. But there were, he notes, other Holocausts, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany. The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, the Congo, Kenya and Vietnam are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black, Brown and Native Americans.
They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators. Adolf Hitler, as Aimé Césaire writes in Discourse on Colonialism, appeared exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man.” But the Nazis, he writes, had simply applied “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
Outside of the West, Mishra argues, there is a very different paradigm. The dominant story for much of the globe is that of decolonization and the crimes of the colonizers. This divergence of experience and viewpoint explain, Mishra writes, why there has been such disparate reactions to the genocide in Gaza, why to those in the Global South there was an instant understanding of the plight of the Palestinians, why they see the clear color lines between the Israeli occupiers and the Palestinians, why they grasp how, in the West, the world is starkly divided into worthy and unworthy victims.
Joining me to discuss The World After Gaza is Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present and other works of fiction and nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and the London Review of Books, among other publications.
You open the book by talking very early on about what watching this live-streamed genocide has done. You call it a psychic ordeal, which it is, of course, especially for those of us such as myself who worked in Gaza, an involuntary witness to an act of political evil. But it sends as you write a message, a clear unequivocal message, to the rest of the world. What is it?
Pankaj Mishra: I think it’s a message that we are perhaps moving into an era where international law, basic morality, ordinary decency are not going to be found much, especially not in the conduct of our politicians and journalists. And that is, I think, you know, something much, much more disturbing than what many people knew back in the 1930s, because back then there were a lot of countries actively pushing back, resisting the onslaught of fascism. And precisely those very same countries today are, you could say, at the forefront of authoritarianism. Something worse than authoritarianism, actually.
Chris Hedges: Why is it worse?
Pankaj Mishra: Well, I think, you know, this is in the past we’ve had authoritarianism such as that we’ve seen in China and elsewhere that has not made claims on other people’s territory, especially territories thousands of miles away. Yes, in the last couple of weeks, we have seen some extraordinary series of statements and claims by the new U.S. president, which can only portend an era of more bloodshed, more chaos. I mean there’s no getting around this fact that is staring us in the face right now.
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