LEARN. THINK. EXPLORE.
  • Home
  • class sampler
  • Summer 2023
  • Fall 2023
  • FAQ
  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact

Learning Outside the Box

"GLOBAL ISSUES, LEADERSHIP CHOICES":

10/7/2020

0 Comments

 
This Foreign Policy review of Indian historian Pankaj Mishra's new collection of essays, Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire, makes the argument that, seen from the global south, the building ineptitude of the U.S. and the UK is a feature, not a bug, of a system of excess power that is finally turning inward:

"If you can make bad decisions without paying the costs, you will probably make them repeatedly. Privilege has blinded the country’s cosseted elite, indulging its delusions by protecting it from their consequences. The reckless disregard for reality is nothing new, in this theory. It has plagued U.S. leadership for decades, though the costs have usually been paid by other countries. The difference now is that the chickens are returning to roost. ... If there is one event that undergirds Mishra’s worldview, it’s World War I. The century preceding it had been an exceptionally calm one in European history—a 'hundred years’ peace,' the economic historian Karl Polanyi called it, during which leading countries fought each other only rarely and briefly. With peace came prosperity, and by 1914, John Maynard Keynes remarked, even the middle classes possessed 'conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.' Europe appeared the height of civilization and Britain the apex. Or, at least, that’s how it looked from London. From Beijing, Léopoldville, and Calcutta, the view was different. Europe’s hundred years’ peace had been a century of invasion, subjugation, and outright slaughter in the world beyond Europe. Mishra mentions, among other atrocities, Belgium’s extractive rubber regime in the Congo, the hundreds of thousands killed in the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, and the massacres of the Herero people in German South West Africa (tantamount to genocide, Germany has since admitted). All this, he implies, was the price of those “conveniences, comforts, and amenities” that middle-class Westerners blithely enjoyed. When World War I broke out, its ferocity took Europeans aback. Displaying a sort of 'imperial insouciance,' they had largely ignored the capacity of their own governments for mindless brutality. But nothing about the war was surprising to those in the colonized world, Mishra argues. Africans and Asians knew European boasts of civilization to be hollow. World War I was merely the 'extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism' boomeranging back on its perpetrators.

"The pattern of World War I is the one to fear today, Mishra warns. ... Mishra excoriates the liberal thinkers of the Anglophone world for what he takes to be their narcissism—'their own mind-numbing simplicities about democracy, its enemies, friends, the free world and all that sort of thing.' The deficiencies of such smug doctrines have been readily apparent in the global south for decades, Mishra believes. There, the United States pursued freedom and democracy by backing despots, meddling in elections, opposing wealth redistribution, and enforcing austerity. ... [H]e notes how frequently the advocates of liberalism have papered over racism. Talk of freedom and rights, Mishra notices, usually comes with a tacit addendum: but only for some. ... Woodrow Wilson spoke for self-determination but launched a 19-year military occupation of Haiti. You can trace a chain of hypocrisy from Thomas Jefferson keeping his own children enslaved to George W. Bush’s disastrous so-called liberation of Iraq. One time and perhaps it’s an accident; 17 times and it starts to look like a pattern. Whenever the full extension of liberal freedoms threatens the privileges of the powerful, liberal leaders have sought to restrict those freedoms because they have never truly been comfortable with the consequences of substantive equality.  ... [L]iberals have adopted a 'blinkered history,' screening out the inequalities, violence, and racism endemic to their preferred system. ... Obsessed with procedural justice but largely unbothered by economic inequalities, liberals nodded politely as 'kleptocratic oligarchies' took root in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Mishra writes. And now, on cue, the oligarchs have seized the Oval Office. ... Perching atop the commanding heights doesn’t give you a better view; it gives you a worse one, because benefiting from a stark inequality tends to rob you of perspective. Without any intellectual ventilation, without taking seriously the warnings of those with other vantages, you’ll end up where we are, with 'blond bullies' presiding over Washington and London and a baffled elite unable to do anything about it.
"
foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/21/pankaj-mishra-you-can-only-see-liberalism-from-the-bottom/
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Blog sharing news about geography, philosophy, world affairs, and outside-the-box learning

    This blog also appears on Facebook:
    www.facebook.com/LearningOutsideTheBox.LearnThinkExplore

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016

    Categories

    All
    Biogeography
    Book
    Cartograms
    Climate
    Contests
    Cultural Geography
    Demographics
    Economic Geography
    Extraplanetary Geography
    Geography Technology
    "Global Issues..."
    Historical Geography
    Human Geography
    Language Geography
    Miltary Geography
    Out Exploring
    Outside The Box
    Philosophically Speaking
    Physical Geography
    Political Geography
    Quiz
    Science Fiction
    Scifi
    U.S. Geography
    Video/interactive
    World Geo_Africa
    World Geo_Asia
    World Geo_Europe
    World Geography
    World Geo_Latin America
    World Geo_Mid.East
    World Geo_N America
    World Geo_Oceania
    World Geo_oceans
    World Geo_polar
    World Geo_S America

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • class sampler
  • Summer 2023
  • Fall 2023
  • FAQ
  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact