Pankaj Mishra: The World After Gaza

Another great book interview by Chris Hedges, again with an extremely erudite author who’s written a book about Gaza. Their discussion ranges to places that most are unwilling to go, like: why should the rest of the world grant primacy to the Jewish holocaust as a historical occurrence? Why should they even know about it when they’ve suffered their own holocausts, at the hands of the same empire that is browbeating them to bow in obeisance to the memory of the horror of the last holocaust it actually helped to stop.

The World After Gaza (w/ Pankaj Mishra) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

At 12:53,

“Pankaj: There is an accusation, which is often leveled against many people in Asian countries and African countries that they are indulging in holocaust-denial. And, often, there are people in Asia and Africa who are either really ignorant about this monstrous act of violence—which is the holocaust—and often there are people who are very extremely underinformed.

“And I think what is much less remarked upon, is the extraordinary level of a version of holocaust-denial in western countries. The fact that there is this long past of imperialism, of slavery, of enormous violence inflicted on many different parts of the world, many different populations across the world. If you today try to bring this up, or try to talk about it, you’d be denounced as a member of some woke conspiracy and dismissed or stigmatized or denounced. But this is something that’s been going on for an extremely long time, and I think among the other consequences, this has had an effect of seriously crippling any attempt at understanding the world as it exists today.

“The World After Gaza by Pankaj MishraThe fact that large parts of the world have a cultural memory, a historical memory of the atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by western powers. And that that has actually gone into the making of their collective identity. And that that is how they see themselves in the world. That’s how they position themselves in the world. And of course that narrative—that they believe in—is now much, much more antagonistic, much more, in-a-way assertive, especially when it comes into contact with these western self-flattering narratives about how the west beat down two major totalitarian regimes, how it liberated the sort of Jews of Auschwitz, just very recently…

“Chris: which—I just want to interrupt—which, you as you point out in the book, isn’t true historically. The Soviets liberated almost all them [the concentration and death camps]

“Pankaj: Of course. […] There are ways in which you can spin all this, spin D-Day as far more important than all the contributions of the Red Army. The way in which history is taught in large parts of Western Europe and the United States, the fact that you still had as late as the early 2000s, the BBC broadcasting a documentary about the British Empire that made the British seem a globally benevolent force. It’s not at all surprising that there would be, today, amplifying propaganda about what is happening in Gaza today. These have been propagandist outfits for some time, sort of indoctrinating, brainwashing large populations. And so, I think this is a really serious problem that has to be addressed.”

In the chapter “The fundamental truths of the Holocaust”, they talk about how even renowned critics like Primo Levi noted that a terrible side-effect of the Holocaust was the “unleashing of evil”, as if the centuries of colonialism wrought upon the Global South (called the “Third World” at t the time) weren’t evil.

This institutional elision of evil perpetrated by the west against others is a real problem for being able to process current events and for choosing a way forward for the world. The Vietnamese are not, in any way, obligated to remember or to even know about the Holocaust (capitalized to emphasize its unique evil), as they have dedicated their institutional memory to the holocaust perpetrated against them by France, the United States, and a complacent west.