"As it turned out," he writes, "the autocratic modernizers failed to usher a majority of their wards into the modern world, and their abortive revolutions from above paved the way for more radical ones from below, followed, as we have seen in recent years, by anarchy."
The terrorist attacks in Paris or London were driven by the same ressentiment, Mishra points out, as that which led Timothy McVey to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, including 19 children, and injuring 684. And when the American was imprisoned in Florence, Colo., the prisoner in the adjacent cell was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993. After McVey was executed, Yousef commented, "I never have [known] anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his."
Mishra writes, "Malignant zealots have emerged in the very heart of the democratic West after a decade of political and economic tumult; the simple explanatory paradigm set in stone soon after the attacks of 9/11 -- Islam-inspired terrorism versus modernity -- lies in ruins." The United States, aside from suffering periodic mass killings in schools, malls and movie theaters, has seen homegrown terrorists strike the Boston Marathon, a South Carolina church, Tennessee military facilities, a Texas Army base and elsewhere.
"The modern West can no longer be distinguished from its apparent enemies," Mishra notes. The hagiography of the U.S. Navy sniper Chris Kyle -- who had a tattoo of a red Crusader cross and called the Iraq War a battle against "savage, desperate evil" -- in Clint Eastwood's movie "American Sniper" celebrates the binary worldview adopted by jihadists who deify their suicide bombers.
The backlash, Mishra writes, resembles the anarchist, fascist and communist violence and terrorism that took place at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century. In one of the most important parts of his brilliant and multi-layered analysis of the world around us, Mishra explains how Western ideas were adopted and mutated by ideologues in the global south, ideas that would become as destructive as the imposition of free market capitalism itself.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran, for example, borrowed liberally from Western ideas, including representation through elections, egalitarianism and Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary vanguard, which was adapted for a Muslim world. Nishida Kitaro and Watsuji Tetsuro of Japan's Kyoto School, steeped in the romantic nationalism of German philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, transformed the glorification of the German nation into a glorification of imperial Japan. They "provided the intellectual justification for Japan's brutal assault on China in the 1930s, and then the sudden attack on its biggest trading partner in December 1941 -- at Pearl Harbor." South Asia's most important writer and scholar, Muhammad Iqbal, provided a "Nietzschean vision of Islam revivified by strong self-creating Muslims." And the Chinese scholar Lu Xun called for Chinese to exhibit the "indomitable will exemplified by Zarathustra." These bastard ideologies cloaked themselves in the veneer of indigenous religious traditions and beliefs. But they were new creations, born out of the schà ¶pferische Zerstà ¶rung, or "gale of creative destruction," of global capitalism.
"The xenophobic frenzy unleashed by Clint Eastwood's film of Kyle's book suggested the most vehement partisans of holy war flourish not only in the ravaged landscape of South and West Asia," Mishra writes. "Such fanatics, who can be atheists as well as crusaders and jihadists, also lurk among America's best and brightest, emboldened by an endless support of money, arms, and even 'ideas' supplied by terrorism experts and clash-of-civilization theorists."
Donald Trump, given the political, economic and cultural destruction carried out by neoliberalism, is not an aberration. He is the result of a market society and capitalist democracy that has ceased to function. An angry and alienated underclass, now making up as much as half the population of the United States, is entranced by electronic hallucinations that take the place of literacy. These Americans take a perverse and almost diabolical delight in demagogues such as Trump that express contempt for and openly flout the traditional rules and rituals of a power structure that preys upon them.
Mishra finds a similar situation in his own country, India. "In their indifference to the common good, single-minded pursuit of private happiness, and narcissistic identification with an apparently ruthless strongman and uninhibited loudmouth, [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi's angry voters mirror many electorates around the world -- people gratified rather than appalled by trash-talk and the slaughter of old conventions," he writes. "The new horizons of individual desire and fear opened up by the neoliberal world economy do not favor democracy or human rights."
Mishra excoriates the West's idealized and sanitized version of history, "the simple-minded and dangerously misleading ideas and assumptions, drawn from a triumphant history of Anglo-American achievements that has long shaped the speeches of statesmen, think-tank reports, technocratic surveys, newspaper editorials, while supplying fuel to countless columnists, TV pundits and so-called terrorism experts." The mandarins who spew this self-serving narrative are, as American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called them and their ilk, the "bland fanatics of Western civilization" "who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence."
The roots of modernization and colonization are, as Mishra writes, ones of "carnage and bedlam." The rapacious appetite of capitalists and imperialists never considered "such constraining factors as finite geographical space, degradable natural resources and fragile ecosystems." In carrying out this project of global expansion, no form of coercion or violence was off-limits. Those who opposed us simply learned to speak our language.
"The intellectual pedigree of today's nasty atrocities is not to be found in religious scriptures," Mishra writes. "French colonialists in Algeria had used torture techniques originally deployed by the Nazis during the occupation of France (and also were some of the first hijackers of a civilian aeroplane). Americans in the global war on terror resorted to cruel interrogation methods that the Soviet Union had patented during the Cold War. In the latest stage of this gruesome reciprocity, the heirs of Zarqawi in ISIS dress their Western hostages in Guantanamo's orange suits, and turn on their smartphone cameras, before beheading their victims."
The West's dangerous faith in the inevitability of human progress is chronicled by Mishra through the dueling French intellectuals Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, Karl Marx, Fichte, Giuseppe Mazzini and Michel Foucault. This intellectually nuanced and philosophically rich book shows that ideas matter.
"The Hindu, Jewish, Chinese and Islamic modernists who helped establish major nation-building ideologies were in tune with the main trends of the European fin-de-sià ¨cle, which redefined freedom beyond bourgeois self-seeking to a will to forge dynamic new societies and reshape history," Mishra writes. "It is impossible to understand them, and the eventual product of their efforts (Islamism, Hindu nationalism, Zionism, Chinese nationalism), without grasping their European intellectual background of cultural decay and pessimism: the anxiety in the unconscious that Freud was hardly alone in sensing, or the idea of a glorious rebirth after decline and decadence, borrowed from the Christian idea of resurrection, that Mazzini had done so much to introduce into the political sphere."
Mishra goes on:
"ISIS, born during the implosion of Iraq, owes its existence more to Operation Infinite Justice and Enduring Freedom than to any Islamic theology. It is the quintessential product of a radical process of globalization in which governments, unable to protect their citizens from foreign invaders, brutal police, or economic turbulence, lose their moral and ideological legitimacy, creating a space for such non-state actors as armed gangs, mafia, vigilante groups, warlords and private revenge-seekers.
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