by SALADDIN AHMED
The ideology that initiated the recent anti-leftist campaigns has been developing democratic discursive strategies for the last 75 years following the fall of old fascism in Europe. For instance, race-talk is no longer part of official and academic discourse; instead, culture-talk is prevalent, which is far more effective for the racist massification of people and the normalization of exclusionary fanaticism among ordinary people.
Despite its democratic-sounding claims of plurality, the culturalist mentality is racist through and through. There is a long history of anthropologizing the non-white Other. In accomplishing that racist purpose, the paradigm of “culture” has been decisive, especially since the demise of internationalism in the 1980s. The collapse of Communism as an international/ist movement meant the immediate rise of neofascist ideologies. Thanks to the paradigm of culture, it has become possible for fascist worldviews to find a home in liberal discourses. The mystifying and pseudoscientific notion of “culture” makes essentializing all non-Europeans possible without having to use the outdated term of “race” and at the same time allowing the speaker/writer to sound like someone who believes in diversity. Today’s fascists and liberals alike take it for granted that the world is composed of different cultures, and those cultures are at the essence of “identities.”
The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, assumption is that Europeans, Euro-Americans, and Euro-Australians, represent a civilization whereas others in the world embody “cultures”. The civilization, by definition, entails infinite potentialities and universal freedoms whereas culture is definite anthropologically, local geographically, closed up communally, and a finished product historically. The essentializing premises of culturalism are not among the subjects of the dispute between liberals (including many self-proclaimed leftists) and extremists on the right. Rather, the main subjects of the dispute have to do with the degree to which the West should be open toward other “cultures.” While this difference is not insignificant in terms of state policies, the mentality of the-West-and-the-Rest is deeply racist and tribalist. The implicit premises of culturalism alone are enough to render adherents of culturalism fanatic sectarians — contrary to their image of themselves as faithful embodiments of a democratic, pluralist, and tolerant canon.
Culturalism is the direct offspring of the mentality that justified committing true barbarianism against First Nations Americans and Australians in the name of a war of the “civilized” against the “barbarians.” Some of today’s spokespersons of the Enlightenment’s liberalism and the civilization are not liberal enough to even tolerate the term “colonialism,” which is precisely why post-colonial studies have become the new racist campaign’s latest obsession in both France and the United States. While the new object of this old phobia is post-colonial studies, the real targets are neither post-colonialisms nor studies. The real target is the same old one: universal equality and leftists who still dare to struggle for it.
Global tribalism in the name of universality
Let us take an example of a text that embodies the old universal discrimination presented in a language of what should be termed ‘democratic camouflage’ of cultural racism or culturalism. Recently, Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College and former editor of The New York Review of Books wrote a commentary supposedly defending classics and the Enlightenment liberalism against scholars who dare to question some of the premises in those fields and criticize the prevalent homogeneity in the relevant scholarship.
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