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

The Holocaust is often considered the defining, unique act of evil for people in the West. Lesser known are the many other genocidal escapades of Western governments.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The Holocaust is the quintessential example of human evil for people in the West. In the rest of the world, especially in the Global South, the atrocity of the Holocaust — genocide — has had a closer proximity both in time and place. Colonialism in Africa, destructive wars in Asia and most recently, genocide in the Middle East, have shaped the lives of billions of people.

On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his latest book, “The World After Gaza.” Mishra argues that the shifting power dynamics in the world means the Global South’s narrative on atrocity can no longer be ignored and the genocide in Gaza is the current crux of the issue.

“Large parts of the world have a cultural memory, historical memory of the atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by Western powers. And that has actually gone to the making of their collective identity. And that is how they see themselves in the world,” Mishra tells Hedges.

Mishra explains that in the case of Israel, Zionist leaders weaponize this narrative by tying the safety and existence of the state of Israel to the defense against the evils of the Holocaust. In other words, the Zionist state exploits the suffering of millions for the benefit of the powerful.

“The words of politicians like Netanyahu, the rhetoric of people like Joe Biden insisting that no Jewish person in the world is safe if Israel is not safe, consistently connecting the fate of millions of Jews living outside of Israel to the fate of the state of Israel, I cannot think of anything more antisemitic. And yet these people keep doing it, endangering Jewish populations elsewhere,” Mishra says.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

Pankaj Mishra in his latest book, “The World After Gaza,” argues that the postwar global order was shaped in response to the Nazi Holocaust. In the West the Shoah was the benchmark for atrocity, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory serves to justify Israel’s settler colonial, apartheid state, as well as sanctify Jewish victimhood. But there were, he notes, other Holocausts, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany. The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, the Congo, Kenya and Vietnam are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black, Brown and Native Americans.

They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators. Adolf Hitler, as Aimé Césaire writes in “Discourse on Colonialism,” appeared exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man.” But the Nazis, he writes, had simply applied “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.” Outside of the West, Mishra argues, there is a very different paradigm. The dominant story for much of the globe is that of decolonization and the crimes of the colonizers. This divergence of experience and viewpoint explain, Mishra writes, why there has been such disparate reactions to the genocide in Gaza, why to those in the Global South there was an instant understanding of the plight of the Palestinians, why they see the clear color lines between the Israeli occupiers and the Palestinians, why they grasp how, in the West, the world is starkly divided into worthy and unworthy victims.

Joining me to discuss The World After Gaza is Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present and other works of fiction and nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and the London Review of Books, among other publications. You open the book by talking very early on about what watching this live-streamed genocide has done. You call it a psychic ordeal, which it is, of course, especially for those of us such as myself who worked in Gaza, an involuntary witness to an act of political evil. But it sends as you write a message, a clear unequivocal message, to the rest of the world. What is it?

Pankaj Mishra

I think it's a message that we are perhaps moving into an era where international law, basic morality, ordinary decency are not going to be found much, especially not in the conduct of our politicians and journalists. And that is, think, you know, something much, much more disturbing than what many people knew back in the 1930s, because back then there were a lot of countries actively pushing back, resisting the onslaught of fascism. And precisely those very same countries today are, you could say, at the forefront of authoritarianism. Something worse than authoritarianism, actually.

Chris Hedges

Why is it worse?

Pankaj Mishra

Well, think, you know, this is in the past we've had authoritarianism such as that we've seen in China and elsewhere that has not made claims on other people's territory, especially territories thousands of miles away. Yes, in the last couple of weeks, we have seen some extraordinary series of statements and claims by the new US president, which can only portend an era of more bloodshed, more chaos. I mean there's no getting around this fact that is staring us in the face right now.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about the way in particularly the Western world has responded. Not just the leadership, which of course has made any kind of descent to the genocide on college campuses and other places a criminal act and hounded professors and students who have stood up, but also the press. You note about the New York Times editors instructing their staff in an internal memo to avoid the terms refugee camps, occupied territory, and ethnic cleansing. How much does this portend the kind of moral bankruptcy within Western culture?

Pankaj Mishra

I would say, look, I don't know about Western culture. I can speak very specifically about certain very prestigious, at least formally prestigious, legacy periodicals who have manifested a degree of not only moral but a sort of intellectual bankruptcy in confronting Israel's actions in Gaza and elsewhere, of course, in Syria and Lebanon. The omissions, the suppressions, the evasions, the sheer accumulation of mendacity, of falsehoods—I just can't think of a more terrible indictment of the mainstream press, such as we have seen over the last few months. And I really sort of fear that these periodicals are not going to be able to recover from this. This is a lasting damage to their credibility, to their legitimacy. And I say this as a concerned writer, as a contributor to some of these periodicals. How do you recover from something like this? There is no easy way back to some kind of intellectual and moral integrity. They also seem completely helpless at this point. Clueless, I think is the word. Before Trump, before this onslaught of the far right, they actually have really no responses to this. Every time Trump says something, he says, let's ethnically cleanse Gaza, they come up with an article saying, but there is a problem in this plan that is the presence of Hamas in Gaza. So I think we are looking at a steady normalization of the most violent and extreme kind of rhetoric. This is what the mainstream press has to offer at this moment.

Chris Hedges

You spend a lot of time in your book talking about the Holocaust and quote a lot of great writers about the Holocaust like Primo Levi. You write that remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present, which of course raises the whole issue of the plethora of Holocaust studies which exist on every university in this country, well funded. Germany itself of course holds up the Holocaust as a kind of penance within German society and yet we watch it once again. What's failed? What didn't work?

Pankaj Mishra

Well, I think if you're going to teach the Holocaust as a very specific lesson, whose main message is the protection of the state of Israel, no matter what the state of Israel does, then of course you'll end up in this situation where Germany, which actually makes the strongest claim as a regular commemorator of Nazi crimes against Jews and combined with very solid support for the state of Israel. But of course, it's completely unthinking, completely uncritical. So we've reached a point where the German arms have fueled Israel's attack on Gaza, Israel's destruction of Gaza. And yet there is no recognition that you've got to stop at some point. You do owe, you do of course owe a great, you do have a great responsibility to the state of Israel, but that does not mean giving them a license to commit endless massacres. And you know, I think you could say the same about Holocaust education in many other places, that it's very particular lesson seems to be do whatever you can to protect the state of Israel, no matter how wildly and violently the state of Israel behaves.

Chris Hedges

Well, there was a quid pro quo at the end of World War II. Germany immediately sent it, almost immediately after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, began to supply it with weapons and of course, billions of dollars in reparations. And the quid pro quo was that they turned the other way and didn't look at the dispossession of Palestinians of their land and Israel gave Germany a kind of legitimacy, I think you argue.

Pankaj Mishra

I do argue that and I think the evidence now is clear. People have started to look into this more closely. A couple of books out that I refer to. And I think the cynical, the utterly cynical nature of these transactions is now much, much plainer than it was. I think we realize that large numbers of people have been deceived into thinking that this was some kind of a moral debt that the Germans owed and that's what they were discharging all this time. It's now clear that actually there were some really insidious elements to this relationship and especially I think the exchange of heavy weaponry, exchange of arms and often sort of naked bribery and sort of blackmail. It's quite really shocking some of the details of this relationship.

Chris Hedges

Well, even during the [SS officer Adolf] Eichmann trial, they go so far as to protect a major Nazi figure within the hierarchy of the German government, not to name him.

Pankaj Mishra

Absolutely. I mean there are many many such sordid sort of details locked away actually you know in archives which are still inaccessible to researchers and to writers. I'm sure more of this stuff is going to come out at some point.

Chris Hedges

Let's talk about the Holocaust that beset the Global South. I mentioned the famine, Kenya, because I think that is one of the crucial points of your book, that those historical experiences and that lasting trauma, which is minimized, whitewashed. I just read “Imperial Reckoning,” the book on the British crushing of the Mau Mau [decolonial rebellion in Kenya]. And what was, it's a great book, but what was so disturbing about it was the silence that not just the Moi, the Kenyans, the West, the Brits, managed to envelop the wholesale slaughter of Kikuyu and others within Kenya. But that's just typical of what we have done to erase the experience of many, many peoples. Can you talk about that, all those late Victorian Holocaust that we've kind of written out of history?

Pankaj Mishra

Well, you know, Chris, I think there is an accusation which is often grounded, 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, you know, extremely under informed if they do know something about it. And I think what is much less remarked upon is the extraordinary level of a version of Holocaust denial in Western countries. You know, the fact that 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. You know, the fact that large parts of the world have a cultural memory, historical memory of the atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by Western powers. And that has actually gone to the making of their collective identity. And 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 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 Jews of Auschwitz just very recently.

Chris Hedges

Which I just want to interrupt, as you point out in the book isn't true historically. The Soviets liberated almost all the death camps.

Pankaj Mishra

Of course, you know, there are ways in which you can, you know, spin all this, spin D-Day as far more important than all the contributions of the of the Red Army, the way in which history is taught in large parts of Western Europe and the United States, you know, the fact that you still had as late as the early 2000s, the BBC broadcasting a documentary about the British Empire that made British seem like a globally benevolent force. It's not at all surprising that there would be today amplifying propaganda about what is happening in Gaza today. You know, 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. Some of these narratives, some of these antagonistic narratives have to be reconciled.

It's really leading to just more conflict and more animosity because a lot of this long history of violence is simply not acknowledged. Nobody is really seriously asking for reparations. I mean, there are a very small number of people who are doing that. But a simple acknowledgement that there is this very long history of suffering that we've all participated in, both as victims and perpetrators.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about Jewish identity. You quote [Israeli journalist] Boaz Evron, that Israel, for many Jews in the West, had become necessary because the loss of any other focal point to their Jewish identity, indeed so great was their, this is you writing, was their existential lack that they did not wish Israel to become free of its mounting dependence on Jewish American support. I thought that was a really important point. Can you explain?

Pankaj Mishra

You know, Chris, I think this is something that could be applied to a lot of diasporic populations, especially in the United States. People who moved there from elsewhere with sort of ancestral memories, some idea of their ancestral heritage. And I think at some point, while living in the United States, living in what is essentially a materialistic society with not much of a tradition, with not much of a heritage, unlike most of the parts of the world, and they seek to capture some kind of meaning, some kind of identity for themselves by affiliating themselves to the sort of ancestral heritage that they have. And I think in many cases, most famously, I can see this in case of Hindu nationalism, for instance.

There are any number of people, secular, highly educated, people with no faith in God, no sort of religious faith whatsoever. And yet, can become extremely vulnerable to the idea of Hindu nationalism. So likewise, I think there has been a large population of Jewish Americans who, despite their secular education, have felt almost a kind of existential imperative to attach themselves to the state of Israel. These are people who are not necessarily descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust, but yet there is a very strong connection and I think it has to do with the peculiar situation of a society that doesn't really offer you too many ways in which to define yourself meaningfully as a member of a larger spiritual and emotional community.

Chris Hedges

Well, you cite that rootlessness in your book “Age of Anger” as being a kind of key factor in the political distortions, whether it's in India or here or anywhere else.

Pankaj Mishra

I think that's right, Chris. I mean, I think it's really important to stress that the Israeli case is not an exception. It's actually an amplification in a very distorted form of a lot of pathologies that we also see in the case of other populations, whether it's the Sikh secessionists or the sympathy for Sikh nationalism. It's just that the Israeli case is far more politically consequential and it distorts, I think, the foreign policy of the United States distorts domestic policy of the United States to a much greater extent than say the Irish support for Irish nationalism or the Hindu support for Hindu nationalism.

Chris Hedges

It's a small point in the book, but I think an important one. But you write about the endemic racism within the philosophical traditions of the West. [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel had sneered at Jews as much as he did at Asians and Africans while elaborating his philosophy of universal development. But this was common. [John] Locke, everyone, was really grounded in a kind of white supremacy. And we kind of wash that stuff out when we read them in university. But I think it's an important point.

Pankaj Mishra

It's an important point. I mean, I think the fact that there is this construction, which is the sort of Western tradition that has come in hugely useful for ideological projects of the kind we saw during the Cold War, you know, representing, creating the unity of the so-called free world in which these disparate philosophical figures can be enlisted and sort of seen as speaking of a certain kind of freedom. Of course, we know that freedom was really only available to a tiny minority back in the 19th century or back in the 18th century. And yet, these philosophers, whether it's Locke or even John Stuart Mill, they're all sort of enlisted into this grand parade of Western civilization. And these are all constructions. These are all ways of inventing tradition. And that's something we should be more aware of rather than taking all this at face value. Just as the Indians have their own kind of invented traditions, just as the Russians have their own, and the Chinese have their own, the West has its own invented traditions, where, you know, a lot of aspects, especially the ones you describe, have been actively suppressed.

Chris Hedges

It's a footnote, but a fascinating one. And it gets into your discussion of the Holocaust itself. I think it's Primo Levi you quote about how the real tragedy of the Holocaust, aside from the loss of life, was that it unleashed evil. But at one point, this is, you're quoting [writer and journalist] Gitta Sereny’s book about one of the survivors that when the transports came in, “As of tomorrow, the transports will be rolling again. And do you know what we felt? We said to ourselves, hurrah, at last we can fill our bellies again.”

I have a friend who was in Auschwitz at the age of 14, and I asked her that question, how she felt when she saw the transports come in, and she said we were happy because we knew we could eat. I want to talk, Primo Levi, I mean, many of the writers on the Holocaust are several that you quote, committed suicide, Levi among them. But I think they grappled with the fundamental truths of the Holocaust about the human condition, which you write about in your book. Can you kind of explain what their position was and what those truths were?

Pankaj Mishra

Thanks Chris. I think Primo Levi was one of those people who was not content with a straightforward tale or narrative of victimhood. He could have easily laid claim to that particular narrative. He was in Auschwitz. He was there for several months. He managed to survive it, just barely. Made his escape, went back to Italy and he could have spend the rest of his life just in the way someone like Elie Wiesel did.

Chris Hedges

What do you call him, the Jesus of the Holocaust or something was that?

Pankaj Mishra

That's actually Alfred Kazin calling him that. He could have also become the Italian Jesus of the Holocaust and just kept talking endlessly about that experience and how that experience commits him to the defense, eternal defense of the state of Israel. He did not do that and it's interesting to ask why. Because as he grew older, and I think it's interesting towards the end of his life, the books he's writing, the essays he's writing, are concerned with the question of complicity. They're concerned with the question of collaboration. They're concerned with asking broader questions about our own complicity in systems of violence and dispossession.

And really also questioning in many ways the whole sort of narrative that has become popular in the West of survivors. He realizes, especially in his encounters with Elie Wiesel, that this narrative has become incredibly influential and it's leading to bad political outcomes. And we think we need much more complex thinking on this, much more complex reflection on this. And that's where he talks in his last published book, “The Drowned and the Saved,” about, I think there's a chapter in there called “the gray zone.” And he talks about the figure of the collaborator and how in many ways, and this is a very surprising conclusion…

Chris Hedges

He's talking about the head of the Łódź ghetto in particular, [Chaim] Rumkowski.

Pankaj Mishra

That's right. Yeah, exactly. And he concludes that that collaborator actually exists in all of us. And that we are also too concerned with, really, with our survival, too concerned to protect ourselves, and in many cases, too concerned with social advancement, some kind of social status. So we don't actually take the risks that we are supposed to take. We become fearful. We sort of retreat into a kind of herd morality. We go along with what other people are doing and this is not just Primo Levi. This is also the conclusions reached by other people who have examined in some detail the behavior of Nazis or German soldiers during the Second World War. How much they were motivated, not so much by ideology, not so much by anti-Semitism, but by very simple things like career advancement by the possibility of material improvements in their lives. And I think it's really, I feel like it's really important to keep that in focus when we talk about these things. If you look at this new documentary, “The Bibi Files,” I'm sure you've seen it.

Chris Hedges

I haven't yet.

Pankaj Mishra

It becomes very clear, I strongly recommend it, it becomes very clear that Netanyahu is only sort of secondarily motivated by his ideological commitments, I think what has taken precedence in this case is the accumulation of personal power and personal wealth. And that is what has been driving him all this time. That is what has basically shaped many of his policies, whether his decision to declare unlimited war on his neighbours. Whether it's his policy of criminal indifference to the fate of the hostages in Gaza. All he wants, really, to hold on to his power and to stay out of prison, most importantly. And he also wants that supply, that flow of expensive pink champagne and cigars coming in from his rich friends in America. So he's a really sort of interesting case, not so much of ideological fanaticism. I mean he and Trump are more alike in many ways than we realize. And they're not bound together by any shared belief in Zionism. They're bound together purely by self-interest.

Chris Hedges

There's a wonderful book, I don't know if you know it, “Prisoners of Fear” by Ella Lingens-Reiner. I had to photocopy mine because it's long out of print. Victor Gollancz published it in 1948. She was an Austrian doctor. She helped Jews flee Austria and she was sent to Auschwitz and she worked with [SS officer and physician Josef] Mengele. Raul Hilberg calls it one of the four best books on the Holocaust. But what she does, unlike a lot of memoirs of the Holocaust, is she writes about Mengele and the Nazis she works with. And she says precisely what you just said, that people like Mengele have no ideology at all. It was all about careerism and personal advancement and climbing within the system. Have you read the novel “The Kindly Ones?” What did you think of it? I thought that it was flawed in some ways, but that certainly was the main theme of that book, was careerism.

Pankaj Mishra

Absolutely, I mean I think that's one reason you'll remember why people like Hannah Arendt and you know after her, Zygmunt Bauman were very concerned to not present the Holocaust as evidence of, purely evidence of, you know murderous anti-Semitism. Of course it was there but it couldn't be reduced to something like you know murderous prejudice. There was a lot more things happening there. And that is what they were interested in finding out. Like, how do we become collaborators in systems of violence? Which is a question we should also be asking ourselves at this point, after just having witnessed a live-streamed genocide. The varying degrees to which we're also complicit in it. And that's something, you know, it's too easy to blame Trump or to blame Biden. Of course they are to be held guilty, or Netanyahu for that matter, but I think there are many other things at play here. And again, it's not just racism, it's not just anti-Arab racism or contempt for Palestinian lives. There are many other things going on here.

Chris Hedges

One of the most important, which Hannah Arendt cites, is the modern bureaucratic state. [Israeli-American historian] Omer Bartov has written two books on this. And you also talk about that in your book, that none of this would have been possible without the creation of the modern bureaucratic state that essentially fragments roles in acts of radical evil to absolve you of any kind of real complicity because your part is just—I think the film Shoah kind of captured that by [Claude] Lanzmann.

Pankaj Mishra

That's very true. That's very true. I mean, the other thing, going back to your earlier point, Hannah Arendt is also someone who traces the construction of that kind of modern bureaucracy for mass killing back to the 19th century, back to imperialist practices. And so this is one way of kind of linking what I see as increasingly antagonistic narratives that this violence suffered by the Jewish population of Europe is something that was in a way prefigured in acts of monstrous violence committed against Asians and Africans in the 19th century.

Chris Hedges

Well, she calls it the innate genocidal potential of the modern bureaucratic state, which makes [Franz] Kafka one of our prophets, of course. So you write and we just mentioned Bauman. Bauman warned repeatedly after the 1980s that such tactics by unscrupulous politicians like [Menachem] Begin and Netanyahu were securing I'm quoting quote “A post-mortem triumph for Hitler who dreamed of creating conflict between Jews and the whole world and preventing Jews from ever having peaceful coexistence with others.” And then you also go on to quote Jean Améry but talk about that, which is what Netanyahu fosters what Netanyahu wants.

Pankaj Mishra

And that's why I think we really can't see him as a representative of Zionism, or even actually existing Zionism, because I think in every sense he is working against the interests of not only the Israeli population, but the sort of larger Jewish population in the world by insisting that they're also part of this, that they are also people who he is protecting by his actions. So sort of implicating them all when there are people living in different parts of the world in perfect amity, who have very little connection with Israel, sometimes no feeling whatsoever for the state of Israel. And yet, the words of politicians like Netanyahu, the rhetoric of people like Joe Biden insisting that no Jewish person in the world is safe if Israel is not safe, consistently connecting the fate of millions of Jews living outside of Israel to the fate of the state of Israel, I cannot think of anything more antisemitic. And yet these people keep doing it, endangering Jewish populations elsewhere. And how very little protest there is against this kind of thing among Jewish organizations. You see this in Britain, you see this in America. There is the other impulse, which is to stand in solidarity with the state of Israel, no matter what the state of Israel does. And I think in that sense, people like Netanyahu and before him Begin, they really are just incredibly bad, incredibly bad for not just the Jewish population around the world, also just the state of, just for sort of social harmony and social solidarity everywhere else.

Chris Hedges

Well, they come, they’re heirs of [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky who you write about. I think [David] Ben-Gurion called Jabotinsky the Jewish Hitler. I think Mussolini praised Jabotinsky. This was a kind of basically and then Meir Kahane, who I covered, in Kach Party, updated it, but it was training militias and you know was really a fascistic model and you quote in the book the letter that was signed by Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein and others denouncing the Herut party, was the party that Netanyahu's father came out of. I mean, there is a fascistic tradition within Zionism, which seems to be ascendant.

Pankaj Mishra

Absolutely. I think again, I have to draw a parallel here and say that these fascistic traditions were present in almost all nationalistic movements that emerged in the late 19th century…

Chris Hedges

Well, including Modi. I mean, Modi's roots come directly out of fascism.

Pankaj Mishra

Absolutely, absolutely out of fascism. And there was a sort of, you know, a companion figure for Jabotinsky, which was the Hindu nationalist ideologue [Vinayak Damodar] Savarkar. And they had roughly similar, you know, strikingly similar trajectories. It's a question very much worth pondering. At what stage do they start becoming dominant within these nationalist traditions or whether there was something within these nationalist traditions that was always hospitable, too hospitable to this kind of fascism.

Chris Hedges

Well, liberal Zionism, you know, the hypocrisy of liberal Zionism has just got—I mean people forget that the massacres and population transfers, ‘67 and ‘48, were done under the directives of quote unquote liberal Zionists. So the rhetoric was different. I knew many of these people, [former mayor of Jerusalem] Teddy Kollek, [Former Deputy Prime Minister of Israel] Abba Eban and others, [inaudible], Abba Eban spoke English better than we do, Oxford grad and all. But what it was was a kind of veneer, was a kind of salesmanship, but I think the point that you just made is very important, that this was always inherent within the Zionist project at its core, and which Ben-Gurion and others privately in their diaries were quite public about, or quite, not public, I mean, quite open about.

Pankaj Mishra

Absolutely, you could argue Chris, I mean I think there is something about the formation of the nation state which requires a degree of violence that can really not be accommodated by a liberal worldview. So there always has to be surreptitiously, at least, a fascistic element at work there. And that might come out in actions, in specific actions and in private diaries, in private accounts, but it's always covered up by the rhetoric of liberal Zionism. And in the case of India, the rhetoric of secular nationalism.

Chris Hedges

Or in Western democracy liberalism.

Pankaj Mishra

Or liberalism, indeed.

Chris Hedges

You have a chapter “Germany: From Antisemitism to Philosemitism,” and I want you to talk about those differences. At the beginning of the chapter you quote Saul Friedländer in his book, “The Years of Extermination,” “Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity for the Jews.” It reminds me of the theologian James Cone writing about lynching and he says the same thing about all the white institutions including the white church. But talk about that difference between antisemitism and philosemitism.

Pankaj Mishra

Well, I mean, I think if you look at it closely, you realize that all the stereotypes that are present in an antisemitic posture are also present in a philosemitic posture.

Chris Hedges

Define philosemitism for people who may not know the term. How would you describe it?

Pankaj Mishra

Well, I think it's as its critics would describe it, and I quote some many of them, [German-American historian] Peter Gay, [inaudible], the German writer, it's an ostentatious form of adoration of Jewish people for no other reason than that they are Jewish.

Chris Hedges

I just want to interrupt you. You know who does this is Proust, Marcel Proust. And Hannah Arendt said if you want to understand antisemitism in pre-war France, read Proust. It's the exoticism. It's all of that. Anyway, just as an aside.

Pankaj Mishra

Yeah, I think the German case is different. I think there are no particular characteristics to this. I think what they're doing is kind of projecting and often they end up projecting as I describe in my book a certain kind of taboo German nationalism onto the state of Israel. There are quotations which I found really shocking when I came across them, people saying after ‘67 in the German press, we thought the Jews were essentially extremely unmanly, sort of unmilitant people. It turns out they are a great heroic people and the way they're describing the campaigns and victories of the 1967 war invoking Nazi German generals, [Erwin] Rommel, or using German, sort of notorious German expressions from that period. It's very clear there is sort of a kind of identification with this newly emergent militant state in the Middle East. Philosemitism is taking all kinds of different forms. At the same time, the German Chancellor is saying we need to have proper relations with Israel. We need to get Israel on its side because the power of the Jews in the United States, especially, should not be underestimated. So you see all the antisemitic stereotypes are present in these versions of German philosemitism. So it's a sort of fascinating phenomenon. Of course, now it's taken to an absurd extreme whereby the Germans, or non-Jewish Germans, now claim the right to describe events in Israel and to depict and to denounce people who criticize Israel as antisemites, no matter if those critics are Jewish. In fact, if they are Jewish, they'll be denounced even more vehemently by Germans whose ancestors, by the way, often happen to be well-placed Nazis or turn out to be. So, I mean, really, the world has been turned upside down. The people with prominent Nazis in their families are accusing Jewish critics of the state of Israel of being anti-Semitic, arresting them. The police, there's so many videos out there of police sort of manhandling elderly survivors of the Holocaust. It's just truly, truly extraordinary.

Chris Hedges

What you call philosemitism, you say it's parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes. And you quote figures like Thomas Friedman and that kind of excitement at the military prowess of Jews and how it is replacing one stereotype with another, which I think is what you're getting at with this philosemitism.

Pankaj Mishra

Well, you know, I think this is an interesting thing. I wish there was more time to explore this in the book. But I think for a lot of colonized peoples too, not just the Jewish population of Europe, people who are exposed to relentless prejudice, like you're weak, you're unmanly, you're cowardly. I think for many of these sort of, you know, victims of prejudice, what actually happened was they ended up internalizing many of these ideas. And in their later conduct as, you know, nationalists, they were very concerned to be seen as essentially incredibly hyper-masculine, strong, unfeeling, uncaring. So precisely the sort of, you know, stereotypes that were the cliches and the prejudices that were leveled at them sort of internalized in. And I think this explains a lot of pathological elements. It, again, not just Israeli nationalism, but also, I would say, in Indian nationalism, this idea that we are now going to show you that we actually don't, we are not embodiments of those old ideas, while at the same time being completely imprisoned within those stereotypes and prejudices.

Chris Hedges

And to what extent does that philosemitism and you write about the endless commemoration of the Shoah, claiming undying support of Israel, does it allow them to escape responsibility for the atrocities that Western powers and Germans inflicted on Asians and Africans, whether under German colonialism, British colonialism, or American colonialism in the Philippines or anywhere else?

Pankaj Mishra

Well, that's what gives the game away the indifference, the relative indifference for the suffering of Asians and Africans during campaigns, during military campaigns, or during just straightforward sort of campaigns of colonialism in Asia and Africa, that if you were really sort of making claim to a moral stance on these issues, you'd be far more accommodating of this other narrative, which is like Germans also committed incredible atrocities on peoples in Asia and Africa. And that should also be part of the German national narrative, which is based on the idea of repentance. But no, all those other narratives are sidelined. It's the sort of German treatment of European Jews that remains dominant in the German national narrative. And again, with all that we know about the cynical relationship between the state of Germany and the state of Israel, that leads you to really question whether there was ever a genuine attempt at reckoning with German crimes, whether against Jews or Asians and Africans.

Chris Hedges

Well, I think it's in your book. Most of the people who collaborated or ran the machinery that made the genocide or the Holocaust possible were never prosecuted. It was 6,000 people that ran Auschwitz and that weren't even…administered Auschwitz. I think that was kind of about the total number of all people. And we're talking about the people who ran the trains and made the cyclone, the gas and everything else. They all got off. And of course, then the CIA recruited Nazi intelligence officials as fast as they could into Western intelligence services.

Pankaj Mishra

And German scientists.

Chris Hedges

And German scientists. We're running out of time, but I just want to ask, you make this point, which is a good one, about the United States into the main center of production for the Shoah’s history. Why? What's that about? I mean, you're talking about the Holocaust Museum in Washington but what is that? And the ties between that and the efforts to limit government intervention. I mean that was a really interesting point.

Pankaj Mishra

I think it's part of a larger sort of consolidation on the right, I think, starting in the 1980s. Those dates are not sort of insignificant. The construction of the memory of the Holocaust, greater support for the state of Israel, the surge, the upsurge of right-wing ideas in American society. And then, of course, we know that AIPAC is not an organization purely simply devoted to the protection of Israel, a lot of corporate power, a lot of corporate interests that are completely indifferent to the state of Israel, completely indifferent to Zionism, are also deeply invested in AIPAC because that is one guarantee against working class consolidation. Or at least they see it as a guarantee against that. They see it as a bulwark against any kind of organized left in the United States. So I think there are many things going into the very deliberate construction of Holocaust memory and the institutionalization of the Holocaust in American memory. And this is, you know, I could only explore a little bit of this subject in the chapters that I have in this book, but there's a lot more to be said about this.

Chris Hedges

Let's close by talking about where we're headed. You talk in the book about how we're creating divisions that are so extreme, largely between the Global North and the Global South that we can no longer communicate. I know from your book, “Age of Anger,” you talked about the political ramifications, which of course we are now seeing both in the United States and have seen for some time in countries like India, Hungary and others, France, Germany, the rise of the far right. What does this all portend?

Pankaj Mishra

Well, I think, you know, it's hard to predict and one shouldn't really say much about the future. But certainly, you know, to put it mildly, the current signs are not encouraging. I mean, I would say to just confine ourselves to the subject of Gaza. I think Donald Trump in just the last two or three days, what he's done is clarified, helpfully, I think, the situation in Gaza. He is being attacked, of course, by the sort of legacy periodicals and by mainstream politicians in Europe and elsewhere for offering fantastical ideas. But I think what he's also done, while posing fantastical ideas, he's also alerted us to the reality of Gaza, which is, it is actually a demolition site. There's hardly any scope there for people to return and to rebuild their homes. So he is pointing to a genuine problem and he's being extremely realistic about it. It's people who say, like the UK prime minister saying, Palestinians should be allowed to go back to their home. These are people indulging in fantasy because we know there are no homes for most of these people. Trump at least is acknowledging that Israel has leveled most of Gaza, destroyed, really, the infrastructure that you need there of every kind, and that something needs to happen. And just talking in the vaguest of terms about Palestinians going back to their homes, reawakening the two-state solution is not going to do it. I think in retrospect, a little bit of reality here might seem almost like a breakthrough. I'm certainly not investing any faith whatsoever. I think he's a very cynical man and all he wants to do is pursue his interest there. But for those of us who've been fighting for just a tiny little bit of illumination, who were denied even the acknowledgement that what Israel has done in Gaza is an abomination, that they've made it impossible for people to live there. At least we can now see that this is now a widely shared fact and that we don't actually have to argue for it. So I don't know what happens next, but I think that is something at least we can now work with, no matter what madness the future brings.

Chris Hedges

Great, thank you, Pankaj. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me on ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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Photos

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