Praise for The Age of Anger: A History of the Present ‘In this urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely study, Pankaj Mishra follows the likes of Isaiah Berlin, John Gray and Mark Lilla by delving into the past in order to throw light on our contemporary predicament, when the neglected and dispossessed of the world have suddenly risen up in Nietzschean ressentiment to transform the world we thought we knew’ John Banville ‘Mishra reads like a brilliant autodidact, putting to shame the many students who dutifully did the reading for their classes but missed the incandescent fire and penetrating insight in canonical texts … no one has discerned better than Mishra just how far we still are from the top’ Samuel Moyn, New Republic ‘An original attempt to explain today’s paranoid hatreds … Iconoclastic … Mr Mishra shocks on many levels’ Economist ‘Important, erudite … Mishra dwells in the realm of ideas and emotions, which get short shrift in most accounts of global politics. So it’s bracing and illuminating for him to focus on feelings’ Franklin Foer, New York Times Book Review Praise for From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia ‘[This] passionate account of the relentless subjugation of Asian empires by European, especially British, imperialism, is provocative, shaming and convincing’ Michael Binyon, The Times ‘Deeply researched and arrestingly original … this penetrating and disquieting book should be on the reading list of anybody who wants to understand where we are today’ John Gray, Independent ‘Retains the power to instruct and even to shock. It provides us with an exciting glimpse of the vast and still largely unexplored terrain of anti-colonial thought that shaped so much of the post-western world in which we now live’ Mark Mazower, Financial Times ‘These are the amazing stories of the grandfathers of today’s angry Asians. Excellent’ Orhan Pamuk ‘Essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today’s Asia’ Amitav Ghosh, Wall Street Journal ‘Timely and important … An astute and entertaining synthesis of these neglected histories’ Hari Kunzru, New York Times Book Review ‘Fascinating … a rich and genuinely thought-provoking book’ Noel Malcolm, Telegraph Praise for An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World ‘Part biography, part history, part travel book, part philosophic treatise, part intellectual autobiography … Mishra’s book is in the best tradition of Buddhism, both dispassionate and deeply engaged, complicated and simple, erudite and profoundly humane’ New York Times Book Review Bland Fanatics Liberals, Race and Empire Pankaj Mishra JUGGERNAUT BOOKS C-I-128, First Floor, Sangam Vihar, Near Holi Chowk, New Delhi 110080, India First published by Juggernaut Books 2020 Copyright © Pankaj Mishra 2020 The essays in this book were published in somewhat different form in the Guardian (chapters 2, 3, 4 and 16), the London Review of Books (1, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13), the New Yorker (15), the New York Times (8, 14) and the New York Review of Books (9) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 P-ISBN: 9789353451196 E-ISBN: 9789353451202 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by R. Ajith Kumar, Noida Printed at Thomson Press India Ltd Contents Introduction 1. Watch this Man 2. The Culture of Fear 3. The Religion of Whiteness 4. The Personal as Political 5. The Man of Fourteen Points 6. Bland Fanatics 7. The Age of the Crisis of Man 8. Free Markets and Social Darwinism in Mumbai 9. The Lure of Fascist Mysticism 10. What Is Great about Ourselves 11. Why Do White People Like What I Write? 12. The Mask It Wears 13. The Final Religion 14. Bumbling Chumocrats 15. The Economist and Liberalism 16. England’s Last Roar Index Introduction I Want Everyone to Become an American Thomas Friedman Someday we must write the history of our own obscurity – manifest the density of our narcissism Roland Barthes The essays in this book were written in response to the Anglo- American delusions that climaxed in Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and, finally, a calamitous response to the COVID19 outbreak. These range from the nineteenth-century dream of imperial-era liberalism long championed by the Economist , in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, through Henry Luce’s proclamation of an ‘American century’ of free trade and ‘modernisation theory’ – the attempt by American Cold Warriors to seduce the post-colonial world away from communist- style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer capitalism and democracy – to the catastrophic humanitarian wars and demagogic explosions of our times. ‘Among the lesser culprits of history’, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, ‘are the bland fanatics of western civilization who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence.’ For Niebuhr, the bigger culprits of history were, of course, communists and fascists. A dedicated anti-communist, the American theologian was vulnerable to phrases such as ‘the moral superiority of Western civilization’. Nevertheless, he could see the peculiar trajectory of liberalism: how ‘a dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the “ideology” of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power’. He was also alert to the fundamentalist creed that has shaped our age – that Western-style capitalism and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and every society, in short, ought to evolve just as Britain and the United States did. Of course, Niebuhr could not have anticipated that the bland fanatics who made the Cold War so treacherous would come to occupy, at its end, history’s centre stage. Incarnated as liberal internationalists, neocon democracy promoters and free-market globalisers, they would blunder through a world grown more complex and intractable, and help unravel large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America before sowing political chaos in their own societies. The global history of the post-1945 ideologies of liberalism and democracy, or a comprehensive sociology of Anglo-America and Anglo- and America-philic intellectuals, is yet to be written, though the world they made and unmade is entering its most treacherous phase yet. Most of us are still only emerging, bleary-eyed, from the frenetic post–Cold War decades when, as Don DeLillo wrote,‘the dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber- capital’. But it has long been clear that the global wager on unregulated markets, and military interventions on behalf of them, were the most ambitious ideological experiments undertaken in the modern era. Their adepts, allies and facilitators, from Greece to Indonesia, were also far more influential than their socialist and communist rivals. Homo economicus , the autonomous, reasoning, rights-bearing subject of liberal philosophy, came to stalk all societies with some fantastical plans to universally escalate production and consumption. The vernacular of modernity coined in London, New York and Washington, DC, came to define the common sense of public intellectual life across all continents, radically altering the way in which much of the world’s population understood society, economy, nation, time and individual and collective identity. Of course, those trying to look beyond the exalted rhetoric of liberal politics and economics rarely found any corresponding realities. My own education in this absence began through an experience of Kashmir, where India, billed as the world’s largest democracy, descended into a form of Hindu supremacism and racist imperialism of the kind it liberated itself from in 1947. I went to the valley in 1999 with many of the prejudices of the liberal Indian ‘civiliser’ – someone who placidly assumed that Kashmiri Muslims were much better off being aligned with ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ India than with the Islamic state of Pakistan. The brutal realities of India’s military occupation of Kashmir and the blatant falsehoods and deceptions that accompanied it forced me to revisit many of the old critiques of Western imperialism and its rhetoric of progress. When my critical articles on Kashmir appeared in the year 2000 in the Hindu and the New York Review of Books , they were attacked at home most vociferously by self-styled custodians of India’s ‘liberal democracy’ rather than by Hindu nationalists. I had come up against an influential ideology of Indian exceptionalism, which claimed moral prestige and geopolitical significance for India’s uniquely massive and diverse liberal democracy. Many of those righteous notions reeked of upper-caste sanctimony and class privilege. Piously invoking the ‘idea of India’, the country’s experiment with a secular and liberal polity, the fetishists of formal and procedural democracy seemed unbothered by the fact that people in Kashmir and India’s north-eastern border states lived under de facto martial law, where security forces had unlimited licence to massacre and rape, or that a great majority of the Indian population found the promise of equality and dignity underpinned by rule of law and impartial institutions to be a remote, almost fantastical, ideal. For decades, India benefited from a Cold War-era conception of ‘democracy’, which reduced it to a morally glamorous label for the way rulers are elected, rather than for the kinds of power they hold, or the ways they exercise it. As a non-communist country that held routine elections, India possessed a matchless international prestige despite consistently failing – worse than many Asian, African and Latin American countries – to provide its citizens with even the basic components of a dignified existence. The halo of virtue around India shone brighter as its governments embraced free markets and communist-run China abruptly emerged as a challenger to the West. Even as India descended into Hindu nationalism, an exuberant