blind fanatics (pankaj mishra)

Pankaj Mishra’s collection of essays is a takedown of both liberalism and its bastard offspring neo-liberalism. The essays span a number of years and some are extended book reviews. Nevertheless, the book as a whole offers a comprehensive alternative slant on the history of the past 300 years. In particular the way in which the Anglo-American model, incorporating a ‘democracy’ which can be exported using force, has been of devastating harm to all those societies it has exploited rather than served. The curious element of Mishra’s commentary is that he appears to do as more of an insider than an outsider. He has read all the figures who have participated in the intellectual construction of the late twentieth and early twenty first version of Anglo-American/ European hegemony. Writers in the US as wide-ranged as Mark Grief or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or the ubiquitous Jordan Peterson. On the Anglo front, he skewers the Amis, Hitchens axis, showing how it has a direct lineage to Imperialist racism, particularly in tis attitude towards Islam. Mishra recognises that political actions are fertilised by intellectual standpoints and that there is a cross-fertilisation which benefits the writers and thinkers whose prose backs up established attitudes. The higher up the food chain you go, the more weight a magazine like The Economist, The Spectator or The Atlantic has. People who write for these publications are writing to speak to and with the elite, those who will decide whether it’s permissible to bomb or to turn a blind eye to genocide. So many critiques of ‘the system’ appear to come from people who have no idea of how the system really works, or how insulated it is. Mishra’s coherent grasp permits his critique to be more comprehensive and telling. Whether we are entering the death throes of the Anglo-US-European age and embarking on a new Asian age is another matter, but the iniquities of liberalism are well and truly skewered in these essays.