What The Hell America!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re joined now for Part 2 of our interview with Pankaj Mishra, award-winning Indian author and essayist, whose new book, titled The World After Gaza: A History, is just out. His previous nonfiction books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. He’s also the author of two novels. He writes regularly for The Guardian and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He joins us now from London.

AMY GOODMAN: Pankaj, I wanted to start by talking about the latest news here in the United States. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is meeting with President Trump today. Modi, though, arrived last night, and his first meeting was with the new director of national intelligence, who had just been sworn in, Tulsi Gabbard, who is Hindu American. She is extremely supportive of Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism, which she called a way of “expressing pride in one’s religion.” She has very close ties to the Hindu nationalist paramilitary, who is a part of the RSS. The RSS spokesperson, Ram Madhav, attended her wedding.

Can you talk about the significance of her ties to the RSS and, for a global audience, what the RSS is, and then what Modi and Trump are trying to accomplish today and that Indian-U.S. relationship?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, you know, I think the RSS, very simply, is described as a paramilitary outfit. It’s the sort of mother organization for the party that rules India today. Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, was a member — is a member of the RSS and, of course, the leader of the BJP. It was set up partly in emulation of the fascist parties of Europe in order to instill a militaristic ethos and spirit among Hindus, who were perceived to be, you know, lacking in manly virtues. So the whole idea was to kind of train and bring into being a more masculine, hypermasculine, kind of Indian. And that project really did not succeed at a national level, until very recently. It’s only in 2014 that the BJP emerged as a party that could actually create a government without relying upon other political parties. And, of course, Modi comes from that kind of background. He’s always been an RSS man, an RSS volunteer, in which capacity he came to the United States several times. He’s often spoken about it.

And Tulsi Gabbard is someone who has been very closely affiliated with this organization. She is, you know, someone who the RRS spotted very early on as an important contact, as a rising figure within American politics, and cultivated her. It’s all been extremely well described, actually, in the Indian press. There’s a magazine, which I strongly recommend to your readers, called Caravan, based in Delhi, which I think carried a cover story — if not a cover story, a very long story — on Tulsi Gabbard’s connection with Hindu supremacists. So it’s not at all surprising, with Trump in the White House, these connections between Hindu supremacists, racial supremacists in the United States are being reactivated, are being taken to a very high level altogether.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Modi — right? — was banned from the United States for years, because when he was the equivalent of governor of Gujarat, the massacre of Muslims took place. And the significance of the closeness now of the Modi-Trump relationship?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, Tulsi Gabbard was one of those people who helped rehabilitate Modi’s reputation in the United States. So, she’s also, you know, in a way, been part of this kind of larger whitewashing operation. And, of course, she’s been favored by Narendra Modi himself for these tasks in sort of — you know, in the 2000s and early — you know, the early part of this decade. There were already very strong connections between the two of them. So, this new position that Tulsi Gabbard occupies now portends even greater intimacy between the security establishments of the two countries, between, you know, I think, the — between Trump and Modi. And we’ll have to wait and see in what realms does this relationship manifest itself.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Pankaj, let’s go now to your book, The World After Gaza: A History, and let’s begin there, in fact. You write in the book, in a sense, your own political biography, having grown up in India in the 1970s in a household that was — you know, admired Israel deeply. So, if you could explain — you know, elaborate on that context, your growing up, and how your admiration diminished over the years, and your visit in 2008, in particular, to the West Bank?

PANKAJ MISHRA: I think a lot of people in my family were members of the RSS. I grew up with RSS members all around me, not just people in my family, but people we knew, people we knew socially, all upper caste, of course. And amongst them, there was a lot of admiration for the state of Israel, for Zionism in particular. And why was that? I mean, we weren’t really aware of Jewish history. We weren’t aware, really, of what happened in Germany in the 1930s and ’40s. We had maybe a tiny bit of historical awareness about that. But really, we admired Zionism and we admired Israel because Israel seemed to us a model of triumphant hypernationalism. It seemed like the nation-state that had finally figured out how to deal with its Muslim minority, something we in India had conspicuously failed to do. And this was, you know, a great charge that the Hindu nationalists always leveled against secular Indian governments, that it was appeasing Muslims all the time, whereas, you know, we looked at Israel and saw Israel continuously subduing and taming an intransigent Muslim population. So that was a great source of inspiration for us in India.

Mind you, this kind of sentiment was confined to a tiny minority of the Indian population then, you know, kind of slightly frustrated Hindu nationalists hoping for power and glory at some stage in the future, but really very remote from it. I’m talking here of the 1970s. Of course, the situation has changed now, and the largest group of Netanyahu’s fans now exists in India, I think it’s safe to say. And again, you see the same kind of envious admiration for Israel, envious admiration for what Israel is doing in Gaza. So, perhaps India is probably today almost the only country in the non-Western world which has sizable, you know, numbers of people, very large numbers of people, who are completely, completely, uncritically pro-Israel — not even pro-Israel, pro-Netanyahu.

So, you know, growing up, of course, in that kind of milieu as a child, you, of course, move on, and then you read other books. You come into contact with people who tell you a little bit more about Israel, about its neighbors, about, you know, Israel’s own history and the history of dispossession of the Palestinians. Of course, there were Palestinian students in India in the 1980s, and I remember meeting them and talking to them about their ordeal. And many of these were refugees from places like Jordan or Kuwait. And then, of course, you know, receiving from them a very different sense of the history of Israel, the history of Zionism.

And then, of course, you know, you go there. You go there, still sort of, you know, completely, in a way, thinking that whatever is happening is perhaps comparable to the problems India is having in Kashmir or the northeast or the kind of problems that nation-states have with minorities on the periphery. But then, of course, you get there, as I did — you know, again, this is a very commonplace journey. A lot of people have had very similar experiences. You get there, very poorly informed, really, about the brutality and squalor of the Israeli occupation. And you get there, and you’re completely shocked. I mean, I don’t want to dwell too much on this, because too many people have described this particular experience.

But even before that, I’d begun to read more widely, more in depth about this issue. I’d started to, you know, ask certain questions, which were oppressing me. You know, how come the survivors of the most monstrous event in human history — and Israel, to a large extent, really was created to house the refugees of, the survivors of the Holocaust, the refugees from Europe — how come that same population ends up inflicting atrocities on another population of stateless refugees? And how is it that Western democracies set aside their own proclamations of a rules-based order, their own sort of, you know, declarations of international norms, to support Israel in whatever it does, and to actually turn a blind eye? And it’s not just politicians, but also journalists doing that, consistently, year after year, decade after decade. So, these are the questions that began to oppress me.

And, you know, I mean, in a way, this book has been kind of long overdue, something I’ve been wanting to write. But there was no encouragement. I mean, I did try to write about it. I sort of wrote about it a couple of times and then approached other outlets that I normally write for or used to write for. And again, the answers were very discouraging. So, you know, in a way, the book really is a kind of culmination of a much longer period of reading and thinking about this subject.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And the book, you know, cites extensively the work of many — it’s very, very — obviously, you read an enormous amount for the book — including the work of many prominent postwar Jewish writers and intellectuals, including Holocaust survivors, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, but also Hannah Arendt and others, to document their early concerns about Zionism and even at points their outright opposition both to Zionism and Israel in the early years of its founding. So, could you explain why you wanted, in a sense, to ground your argument in their words?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, you know, these are people who have suffered the worst humanity can inflict, or human beings can inflict on each other. And miraculously, both emerge, the two figures you mentioned, Primo Levi and Jean Améry, from this experience, obviously, you know, deeply broken, but capable of profound, sustained reflection on that experience. And, you know, I think they’re quite sort of — they’re quite unparalleled in this way. We have a lot of survivor testimonies, but none of them reach the intellectual profundity of the reflections left to us by Primo Levi and Jean Améry.

And I think, you know, in the beginning, of course, they felt a great deal of sympathy for the state of Israel. And Jean Améry, you could argue, kept feeling that right up to the time he killed himself. But there were doubts. And I think Primo Levi, of course, lived longer and expressed those doubts more variously, more eloquently. Jean Améry, before he killed himself, wrote an essay basically saying that he’s heard about Israelis torturing Palestinians, and this is completely unacceptable, that, you know, the solidarity he feels for Israel is going to be heavily circumscribed if this kind of thing carries on. Primo Levi, of course, becomes a much stronger critic of Israel after he comes to know about the 1982 massacres committed under Israeli supervision in Lebanon. And then, you know, of course, he’s attacked by both, actually, sort of Palestinian activists and ultra-Zionists in Italy. And yet, he remains very committed to a strong critique of Israel and of the way it is treating the Palestinians.

And again, I think, you know, these reflections in Primo Levi’s work, which move from a depiction of his experience in Auschwitz to profounder reflections on the nature of victimhood, on the nature of complicity, on the potential of collaboration, the potential of complicity that exists amongst all of us, you know, these are some of the profoundest reflections on the enormous violence of the 20th century. So, no one who’s writing about this subject can afford to not look at them and to learn from them.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, your first book, Pankaj — your first chapter in the book, sorry, is titled “Israel and the Incurable Offense.” And that phrase itself is borrowed from Primo Levi’s book The Truce, which is a sequel to If This Is a Man, in which Primo Levi writes, quote, “This is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offense, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it.” So, could you explain, Pankaj, the significance of what it is that Primo Levi writes there, and why you chose this phrase, “the incurable offense”?

PANKAJ MISHRA: You know, I think he’s talking about something so monstrous, something so evil, that its consequences are, in one sense, limitless, that they will keep damaging the inner lives of not just individuals, but entire societies, entire nations. You know, people say, “What is really the lesson of the Holocaust?” And I think the answer is provided by not just Primo Levi but many other survivors, that it’s impossible to say that something like this really cannot have any clear-cut lessons. What we can see is how this monstrous event, this monstrous evil, works itself out across generations in government policies, in the way we remember atrocities, in the way we internalize certain memories, in the way Israel, for instance, has institutionalized the memory of the Holocaust and constantly invokes it in order to justify its expansionism, its increasingly, increasingly violent and deranged colonialism.

So, I think Primo Levi, even though he did not live long enough to witness these distortions of the memory of the Holocaust, he could see in his own life, and, indeed, in the lives of the societies he knew, what kind of fresh distortions were creeping in. I mean, he came to the United States in the in the mid-1980s and was really appalled by the way Holocaust memory had been commercialized, had been commodified. So, I think there’s a lot to be sort of learned from his particular experience and the way he tried to reckon with this enormous, crushing event of the mid-20th century, and his anticipation of how it will live very long, and now we can see living extremely late into the early 21st century.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Pankaj, as you point out in the book, even though it’s now taken entirely as self-evident, the Holocaust did not occupy such an enormous space in the collective imagination and memory of the West for many decades after the war. Your book charts how this changed in Europe and in the U.S., and indeed in Israel. If you could explain the factors at work that allowed this singular and horrific event to take on the significance it did, and how that sense permeated, first Israel, but then also Europe and the U.S., and how it continues to have effects now?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, you know, people like Primo Levi and Jean Améry — and there were many others — in the ’50s and ’60s, they lived with, you know, maybe the kind of loneliness I just described, where you see absolutely evil perpetrators not being punished — in fact, in some cases, being rewarded, being embraced by the Western establishment because it wanted Germany on its side against the Soviet Union in the new sort of Cold War crusades. So, they saw all this happen and were, you know, really broken by this particular experience, by this enormous loneliness that they felt looking at people who had inflicted such horrible atrocities on them being exalted, being raised, as Jean Améry said, to the majestic halls of the West.

We are looking at a very deliberate construction of the memory of the Holocaust, then, of course, its weaponization, its instrumentalization, at the service of Israeli expansionism. And that process, you know, I think, has not been clear for many people. You know, most people assume that the memory of the Holocaust or the collective memory of the Holocaust flowed organically out of the experience. But that’s not how collective memories work. Collective memories are always a construction, often a very deliberate construction, always meant to service certain ideological projects and ends. And that is what has happened.

Of course, you know, the distortions today of that, especially in the United States, where you also saw — of course, people have written a lot on the subject about how in American politics it became impossible to criticize Israel, and you were at great risk of being ostracized, of essentially terminating your political career. And Trump himself spoke very frankly about it the other day, you know, how there was a time when you couldn’t criticize Israel, and now it’s become so possible, and how now he’s going to institute a regime where it’s no longer possible to do so. So, in many ways, we can see — and this is something I talk about at length in my book — how this memory was constructed, who were the agents, who were the people responsible for constructing it, and what were the existential as well as political and economic needs that drove the institutionalization of this memory.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have a very interesting chapter in your book that talks about “Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism.” We’ve all witnessed over the last 15 months of Israel’s assault on Gaza the extraordinary lengths to which Germany will go to silence pro-Palestinian protest. I mean, it’s also true in the United States, professors being fired. Now President Trump is threatening to deport pro-Palestinian international students. If you could talk about the fact that — I mean, many of the people that are being silenced in Germany are, in fact, prominent Jewish writers, activists and intellectuals. The Israeli-born architect and scholar Eyal Weizman was prompted to write of the irony, saying, quote, “being lectured by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic,” he said. If you can talk about the shift that occurred in Germany, long held us exemplary and having acknowledged what took place in the Holocaust, and now what it is doing to those who criticize what Israel is doing to the Palestinians?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, of course, Amy, I mean, I think, you know, the distortions I was talking about, the Holocaust memory, probably the — you know, in many ways, reached their most grotesque form in Germany, and we can see that in the suppression of Jewish critics of Israel.

But, you know, I think if you go back and look at what happened in Germany after the war, how shallow the whole process of denazification was, and how the student movement of Germany really emerged out of the disgust many young people felt over their Nazi parents and over the Nazi past of their parents and grandparents, over the number of Nazis in public life — of course, you know, there were many already really problematic ways in which, back in the ’60s, that German elites or intellectual elites were engaging with Israel. I describe in the book the sort of transactional relationship that emerged between Germany and Israel, where Germany gave cash and weapons to Israel — and an Israeli philosopher himself put it this way — and we kind of offer them a kind of indulgence, are sort of whitewashing them and making them respectable members of the international community, and basically also turning a blind eye to the fact that Nazis were still dominant in German public life.

Now, that was the basis of the German-Israeli relationship. And now excellent scholarship now exists on this subject. You know, the archives are still closed to researchers, but there is enough evidence out there pointing to the utterly cynical nature of this relationship, and, of course, you know, a kind of identification, which you still now see in the German tabloid press, especially Springer, the big sort of media corporation there, where a very taboo nationalism in Germany, which, as we speak, the far right is making respectable again, that taboo nationalism is projected onto Israelis, and, you know, they are seen as essentially brave people. So, Moshe Dayan is compared to Nazi generals. German advances are — Israeli victories are compared to German victories or German modes of warfare. So, there’s a lot of very creepy stuff going on here, including the number of people in Germany who claim to be Jewish. There was an excellent article in The Baffler about this.

I think, you know, when we look at history, or when we look at political histories, a lot of this kind of stuff gets left out. And I think we need to pay very close attention to, you know, in many ways, the collective psyches of countries or societies that have perpetrated such acts of political evil as the Holocaust. And again, coming back to the idea of the incurable offense, is it really possible for Germany, with all its efforts at collective moral education and its, you know, very ostentatious modes of repentance — is it really possible for them to get over what that country did to the Jewish population of Europe in the ’30s and ’40s?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, one of the very, you know, sinister, as you said, creepy developments here has to do with what you outline in your chapter, “Americanizing the Holocaust,” which is the deepening links between pro-Israel groups and white supremacists. You say that for many years some of the people who most ardently uphold the memory of the Shoah and defend Israel in the U.S. — this remains true today, in the U.S. and Europe — are also often the most authoritarian and antisemitic. So, if you could explain how you think this convergence came to occur?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, it’s part of the larger convergence that we see between Hindu supremacists, you know, of the kind we just discussed. Of course, we know that the current Hindu government, nationalist government in India, is very close to Netanyahu, and, of course, now becoming closer to the Trump administration. So, I think we can see emerging very rapidly what the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez the other day called the reactionary international. And I think we have to very quickly identify this sort of global coalition of far-right forces, the antisemitic Christian evangelical fanatics in the United States, people like Elon Musk from Silicon Valley, again, you know, vending grossly antisemitic conspiracy theories of the “great replacement” on Twitter, on X, and then, you know, suddenly posing as a great defender of Israel — the alliances, you know, between Silicon Valley, Trump, between evangelical Christians, and then, of course, you know, the far right in Germany, other places, in Serbia and in India.

I think, you know, you could argue that a certain mode of racial imperialism back in the 19th century, the haves with survivalist mentalities wanting to violently subdue the have-nots, you know, insisting that might is right, and the weak and the poor must suffer — I think that kind of mentality is coming back and being embraced by many ruling classes around the world. And I would not exempt, you know, the so-called center-left parties from this. I think many of them have started to embrace the prescriptions of the far right, simply to remain in power, simply to survive, so some kind of survivalist mentality. This is something I write about at length in my book, how this is kind of really taking over the world and sort of, you know, essentially, leading to the destruction of all the norms, you know, not just legal norms, but also basic moral values of empathy or solidarity or compassion, that we’ve always needed, that we cannot live without, and how all those values are under siege today by this very strongly emerging reactionary international.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Pankaj Mishra, award-winning Indian author and essayist. His new book is The World After Gaza: A History. You write about — and it might surprise many young people in the United States and around the world — how few Jewish refugees were allowed to come into the United States before the war, during the war and after the war. I mean, the famous movie, The Voyage of the Damned, the St. Louis ocean liner carrying Jews, Hitler let it go because he figured they wouldn’t be allowed into the United States. And the U.S. turned them away. Many would die, being sent back to Germany. If you could talk about why this was? And it wasn’t the U.S. alone. But also, you mentioned the remarkable exceptions, people like the American diplomat Hiram Bingham in Marseille in the late ’30s, who defied orders not to help Jews, and how he helped to get out Marc Chagall, André Breton and Hannah Arendt. And also her position on Israel?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Yes. I mean, you know, there’s actually an excellent PBS documentary by Ken Burns about the American response, really shoddy, absolutely horrific, in fact, American response to the Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany and from other parts of Europe. And I think, you know, for many people, it came as a kind of revelation that there was so much antisemitism at the highest levels of the U.S. government — not just the U.S. government, British government. All the governments that later claimed to have fought the Second World War in order to make the world safe for democracy, in order to defeat, you know, Nazi totalitarianism and to liberate Jews, these were people actively putting up barriers to Jewish refugees who were fleeing Europe at the time.

You know, the reason why I invoke these stories in these narratives is because I also want readers to realize that this situation that the Palestinians find themselves in today, facing not just extreme violence inflicted on them by the Israelis, but also almost sort of, you know, I suppose, without exception, Western regimes of indifference and callousness now, this is something that has happened before. It happened in living memory. And the question I really want readers to take away from this book: What kind of world is it where we allow these kind of things to happen, where people fleeing an explicitly totalitarian, murderous, genocidal, antisemitic regime are turned away? We construct, of course, all kinds of self-flattering narratives later on. But I think the facts of history tell us that people were silent, were complicit even, in acts of violence and dispossession and statelessness.

You know, some of the most prominent writers and intellectuals in Europe, because they were witnessing what blood-and-soil nationalism — how destructive, how murderous it can be, they just thought it was a terrible idea for Jewish people or European Jews to constitute a nation-state that would simply perpetrate the evil ways of their European tormentors. So, it was not very difficult for them to see that this conclusion was very likely, that if you form a nation-state along these majoritarian lines, you will end up really creating, as Hannah Arendt said, a kind of racist horde.

And when we look at Israel today, I mean, we look at the mobs, you know, demonstrating in favor of people who are raping Palestinian prisoners, you can, in a way, verify the wisdom of not just the warnings of Hannah Arendt, but also Einstein. There were so many people who could see that, you know, a nation-state founded on dispossession, founded on systematic, continued violence, would lead to a kind of inner moral decline and derangement. So, you know, it’s strange that those warnings have been disregarded today, and we can think of these people today as — some of them have been denounced even as antisemitic. But, you know, they were responding to just the monstrously evil nature of majoritarian, of racial nationalism that they witnessed in Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Pankaj, towards the end of the book, you write, quote, “It seems imperative, for the sake of both intellectual precision and political progress, to look beyond Israel’s current incarnation. It seems necessary,” you say, “even while substantiating Israel as a case study of Western-style impunity, to examine the condition of powerlessness and marginality that Zionism originally sought to redress, a condition more often found in the histories of Asia and Africa than of Europe and North America, and still painfully unresolved.” So, if you could elaborate on what you think that would mean concretely, and then also the inspiration that you’ve drawn from the protesters, young protesters, pro-Palestine protesters, across the U.S. but also across Europe, during the course of this assault on Gaza?

PANKAJ MISHRA: You know, I wrote that because I felt the history, the modern history of European Jews, has become too much a part of a certain Western narrative, a narrative that, you know, as I said, skips over some very important and very painful facts of systematic violence and discrimination against European Jews, and indeed Jews in other countries, as well, in the West, that actually, in a way, obscures large parts of the historical narrative in order to present a self-flattering narrative. And I think, you know, I was very struck by, I was very curious to see how Asian and African leaders in the first half of the 20th century, how sympathetic many of them were to the demand for a Jewish homeland. Of course, they had no idea what was actually really going on in Palestine, but I think they could instinctively identify with the plight of European Jews who faced pogroms, who faced discrimination, who faced persecution, and felt, yes, they are as much entitled to a liberation from these cruel Europeans as we are. And, of course, you know, that feeling, those sentiments faded very quickly when Israel came into existence and became an expansionist power itself.

So, my attempt really is to kind of reconnect that history of violence and dispossession, which is a very modern history, and sort of bring these narratives together, these narratives that are increasingly antagonistic of decolonization, and the Western narratives of victories over totalitarianism, and to see if there’s some common ground there, because as long as we remain confined to our particular historical narratives, we will not really be able to understand this larger history of violence and suffering that binds us together.

And I think in — you know, coming to your other question, I think the young protesters and students, in general, demonstrated a certain kind of empathy, a certain kind of compassion for the victims of violence, that really was, in a way, in these bleak times, a kind of — almost a kind of moral breakthrough, because, you know, we saw — we saw over the last 15 months how so many powerful people supported and enabled acts of monstrous violence. We saw how many powerful and influential people, including intellectuals, remained silent. It was these students, these young protesters, who risked their careers, who risked a lot, in fact, not just their careers, to go out and protest against these acts of violence and these acts of complicity. And I think, you know, when I look at the future, we are, of course, in a — you know, entering a very dark period. There’s no question about it. But really, what gives me hope is that some of these young people, even though they have been brutally crushed — mind you, not by the Trump administration yet, by the Biden administration — and who are probably now passive and, you know, probably will stay that way for some time — but I hope, as they grow older, as they themselves grow into positions of power and influence, they will carry some memory of these months, some memories of the moral, the profoundly moral position they took in this very dark time. And perhaps they will find a way to keep alive these values of compassion and solidarity, that they so wonderfully, so wonderfully highlighted during these dark last 15 months.

AMY GOODMAN: Pankaj Mishra, we want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning Indian author and essayist. His new book, The World After Gaza: A History. Previous nonfiction books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. He’s the author of two novels, writes regularly for The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, among other publications. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org, I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks so much for joining us.