Pankaj Mishra The Last Days of Mankind

Today, each one of the assumptions that underpinned western policymaking and journalism for nearly three decades lie shattered

Pankaj Mishra

Long before the war erupted, and coverage of it became brazenly mendacious, people of non-Western ancestry were making urgent demands to decolonize Western systems of knowledge, and a change in the self-image of the former empires that enforced white supremacy. This involves an overhaul of public cultures, from replacements of place names, statues and museum holdings to refining of academic curricula, journalism and political rhetoric.

Understandably, this makeover is unacceptable to many in the West. Their response is to double down on failed ideas and shattered assumptions, and scramble to reinforce the structures of inequality that benefitted them. White nationalism in politics today has come to have a sinister counterpart in the cultural realms that seeks to stamp out intellectual diversity even while paying lip service to demographic pluralism.

We have seen this despotic power at work in the attempt by many in Western political, corporate, and media classes to suppress scholarly and artistic explorations of racism and imperialism. We see it now in the crackdown on ordinary political dissent. A lecture I was scheduled to give on Israel, Gaza, and the West for the London Review of Books was pre-emptively canceled by its hosts, London’s Barbican Center. Coming to Canada, I have discovered more instances of people who try to resist the enforced depoliticization of literature and arts and find themselves ostracized.

In 2018, the New York Times called Wanda Nanibush “one of the most powerful voices for Indigenous culture in the North American art world.” And then last year she abruptly disappeared, after some Instagram posts on Palestine, ominously reminiscent of the way even very powerful people used to be airbrushed out of public life in totalitarian societies.

Naomi Klein writes that “the extraordinary raids, arrests and property seizures of the Indigo 11 represent an attack on political speech the likes of which I have not seen in Canada in my lifetime.” Is it merely coincidental that the Globe and Mail deleted all references to Israel from this speech while proposing to publish an excerpt?

The South African writer Kagiso Lesego Molope asked at the Writer’s Trust gala in Toronto a few months ago, “The time is coming when the world will start to apologize for what is happening—and when that time comes we will be asked: what did you do with your power?” It is a question that all individuals and institutions have to ask ourselves. But many of them have, at best, assumed the posture of those Democratic delegates in Chicago who plugged their ears to the names of dead Palestinian children as they walked out of the convention center.

At worst, a range of western institutions—from Ivy League universities to public broadcasters—have resorted to patently anti-democratic measures, violating their own principles of freedom of conscience and speech. Yesterday, the University of California put on its website a list of military weaponry it seeks in order to wage war on its students: the list includes three thousand rounds of pepper munitions, five hundred rounds of 40mm impact munitions, twelve drones, and nine grenade launchers.

I wrote in late February that we are seeing some kind of collapse in the free world. The evidence has accumulated with ominous frequency since then. Perhaps it should not be surprising. The intellectual incompetence and moral turpitude of the fourth estate was diagnosed right from the time Kraus warned against “the intellectual self-annihilation of mankind by means of its press.” Looking ahead to our own era, Gandhi predicted that even “the states that are today nominally democratic” are likely to “become frankly totalitarian” since a regime in which “the weakest go to the wall” and a “few capitalist owners” thrive “cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open.” Vaclav Havel, celebrated as an anticommunist “dissident” in the West, actually argued in his essay “Politics and Conscience” (1984) that totalitarian systems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe represented the future of the Western world; he warned against the power that operates “outside all conscience, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth.”

It is our fate to watch helplessly how a power operating outside all conscience and grounded in ideological fictions can rationalize even a livestreamed genocide. I certainly feel even less confident after Gaza about the possibility of recovering from the post-truth age. My own contributions to literary and intellectual journalism over three decades now seem very insignificant, disproportionate to the recognition and material rewards I have received.

But I cannot fail to recognize how urgently we need fresh ideas about how to rethink our past, and to chart our way out of the present into a liveable future. I strongly believe that they will come from a younger generation of writers, artists, and journalists. I also know that as our polycrisis—inescapable wars, climate disasters, and political earthquakes—deepens, our longings for a vivid and fair description of the world will become even more irrepressible; and many of us will feel compelled to fulfill them.

There are many writers and journalists who won’t join us in this essential task. These are the writers, academics, and journalists killed by the IDF. I cannot get over the fact that the extrajudicial executions of our colleagues, and the destruction of schools, universities, and libraries in Gaza, are still largely unacknowledged by literary, academic, and journalistic communities in the West.

Increasingly, it seems that, as Arundhati Roy pointed out, “the only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihoods.”

Today, I must join those trying to break the inhuman shackles on our minds and souls. I dedicate this prize to the memory of writers murdered in Gaza. I have already given away much of the money that comes with it, and I will give away the rest, to writers and journalists in Palestine. Thank you.

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