By Pankaj Mishra / Bloomberg Opinion
Last fortnight, as stocks in India’s Adani Group tanked in response to an American short-seller’s report, a popular ex-cricket player with 23 million Twitter followers tweeted, “India’s progress is not tolerated by whites.” The conglomerate’s own spokesperson invoked the notorious 1919 massacre of nearly 400 unarmed civilians by British forces. Only a few days earlier, India’s Hindu nationalist government had banned a two-part documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in anti-Muslim riots in 2002 and accused its makers, the BBC, of a “continuing colonial mind-set,” a charge quickly echoed across India’s public sphere.
The Indian elite is hardly alone in opportunistically raising the old banner of anti-colonialism against Western critics. Last year, while announcing his illegal annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced at length the West’s historical depredations in India, China and other parts of Asia and Africa, and cast Russia as the leader of a global anti-colonial alliance against a “racist” and “neocolonial” West.
Make no mistake: Moral condemnation of Western powers has not been so widespread since the mid-20th century, when the “darker nations,” as W.E.B Du Bois called them, fought for national self-determination. And, though amplified by self-serving demagogues, it is again shaping mass perceptions and straining geopolitical relations around the globe.
Western political and media classes are only just becoming aware of the problem and its magnitude: how, for instance, the majority-white nations of Europe and North America appear more and more isolated in their accelerating military and economic campaign against Russia. In a recent poll, more Indians blamed either NATO or the U.S. than Russia for the war in Ukraine. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, one of the most admired leaders in the Global South, believes that “it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The U.S. and the E.U. are also guilty.”
Popular support for Putin has been widespread in Indonesia since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Putin’s anti-colonial rhetoric also increasingly falls on receptive ears in Africa.
These countries won’t be much persuaded by pointing to the barefaced hypocrisy of Putin, who poses as principled anti-colonialist while gobbling up parts of Ukraine. Their memories of exploitation and disastrous interventions by Western Europeans and Americans remain too strong. Perhaps more importantly, they see that the former masters of Asia and Africa are still refusing to address their past of violence, dispossession and plunder.
Indeed, many are busy rediscovering and mainstreaming white supremacist politics and culture. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, is spearheading a Republican effort to stifle academic study of the devastatingly extensive effects of racism. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is hardly isolated among his peers for claiming that British colonialists should have never left Africa. A widely praised new book by a frequent contributor to the Times of London tries to argue a “moral” case for British colonialism.
Such revisionism is part of a pattern in which, faced with intellectually and politically assertive minorities, even many liberal and centrist politicians and journalists in the West have turned to stoking moral panics about “wokeness” and “cancel culture.”
They couldn’t have found an easier way to lose the global propaganda war.
At any given time, historical narratives in which people recognize themselves are jostling with one another. For decades, white Westerners claimed to have made the modern world with their political, intellectual and technological breakthroughs. Today, in a period of relative Western decline, many more people have come to see themselves in another equally compelling narrative; one in which white men subjugated and disparaged much of the world’s population.
Western leaders cannot hope to quell such a deep and broad consensus, which rests upon painful experiences of individual and collective humiliation, by suppressing scholarly evidence of racism and imperialism, or whining about wokeness. They would do better to orient their political and intellectual cultures to the ideal of equality, and the demographic and cultural facts of pluralism.
The U.S. itself once recognized the importance of not losing moral advantage in the global clash of narratives. When the spectacle of local police brutally assaulting civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 provoked international revulsion, President John F. Kennedy was forced to intervene. As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, Kennedy acted because he was then battling for “the minds and the hearts of men in Asia and Africa.”
During the Cold War, Democratic leaders broke with the exponents of Jim Crow in South and speeded up the extension of civil rights to African Americans because they knew that any country claiming to advance a civilized, rules-based liberal order must embody it first. Today, Western nations denounce Putin’s aggression while tolerating, if not nurturing, at home a racial and civilizational arrogance derived from their own colonialist pasts. The world’s opportunistic anti-colonialists may well win this propaganda war by default.
Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is author, most recently, of “Run and Hide.”
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