Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire by Pankaj Mishra. Juggernaut. Pages 224. Rs 599
Book Title: Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire
Author: by Pankaj Mishra.
Rohit Mahajan
Pankaj Mishra, who’s been stinging the neo-liberals of the West with regularity, displaying erudition and breathtaking breadth of knowledge, believes Covid-19 has exposed the two foremost exemplars of liberal politics and economics, the UK and USA. “Heavily indebted states, bailed out corporations, impoverished working classes, and eviscerated public health systems,” he writes in the introduction to his latest offering, a collection of essays in which he clinically dissects the “Anglo-American delusions” of the recent centuries.
The pandemic has forced the Americans and British to examine the ideas of neo-liberalism, which advocate maximum individual choice and freedom from constraints, achieved through small government, free markets and privatisation. “Anglo-American self-deceptions, which always exacted a high death toll abroad, from the Irish famine to Iraq, have become mass-murderous at home; a blusteringly casual attitude to the pandemic has resulted in tens of thousands of premature deaths,” he writes.
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) was born in the immediate aftermath of World War-II, which “did awaken a spirit of social egalitarianism”. The Conservatives were beaten at the hustings, Labour figured that to attract its underclass away from the dangerous seductions of communism, they must be given something — this resulted in a consensus on a mixed economy, leading to, among other things, pensions for the old, widows and those injured at work; NHS was created. However, in the last few years, it has been suffering severe funds cuts, in line with neo-liberal ideals of laissez faire economic principles.
Consequently, when the coronavirus arrived, NHS was found horribly inadequate, and private companies had to be hired. The US has fared worse — the most powerful country suffers in comparison with European and Asian nations that are deeply invested in healthcare.
Covid-19 is only the newest symptom, in Mishra’s view, of the mortal ailment that has Anglo-American liberalism in its grasp. With vast scholarship and sharp forensic analysis, Mishra pricks the self-important promoters of the idea of Western exceptionalism — the neo-liberals and conservatives. Such thought leaders have, over the last 20 years, advocated wars to bring Western liberalism and democracy to the “benighted” parts of the world; they justified the transportation of indentured labour to the colonies; they euphemised torture as “permissible duress”.
Mishra demonstrates that the economic and cultural anxieties Anglo-America is going through have their roots in the classical liberalism of their past and the neo-liberalism of their present. Dangerous ideas can have horrible effects on ground, Mishra shows — such as the race out of Europe to establish colonies, inspired by classical liberalism, which was clearly an accomplice of imperialism; or the neo-colonial race to capture resources and markets. This has resulted in grave human and economic problems.
Mishra’s writings are bound to stoke White guilt; but clearly, Anglo-America didn’t invent imperialism — they only perfected the land-grab and resource-theft that primates have always perpetrated. History never goes away, argues Mishra; yet, at some stage, the blame game must end, mustn’t it? And if not capitalism, what method should be employed to end poverty? Did liberalism yield only bitter fruits? Surely, some good must have come from it. And isn’t a society that accepts sharp criticism from an outsider — as Mishra is in the UK — better now, despite its bloody colonial past, than societies where even mild criticism is forbidden?
