Bland Fanatics: Liberals, the West, and the Afterlives of Empire

Bland Fanatics: Liberals, the West, and the Afterlives of Empire audiobook

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Review #1

Bland Fanatics: Liberals, the West, and the Afterlives of Empire audiobook free

Review#2

This 2020 book is republished articles from 2008 to 2019 in the Guardian, London Review of Books, NY Times, NY Review of Books and the New Yorker. Many are available online, but it’s convenient to have them collected here. The theme is a historical connection between current free market liberalism and past colonialism. Pankaj Mishra is a novelist and essayist with an English literature degree from New Delhi living in London. His writing and concepts are challenging, with references to many historical and contemporary authors.

The articles were mostly published as book reviews. Liberalism, as described in ‘Bland Fanatics’, was an outgrowth of imperialism. Free markets once enforced by gunboat diplomacy and armed occupation are now upheld in sacred precepts of lax labor laws, low regulation and less taxation. This may seem akin to conservatism in the US, but in global market capital speak it is known as liberalism. Other guises of liberalism used to spread the late 20th century creed are said to include democracy, human rights, secularism and free speech.

On Remembrance Day Mishra recalls forgotten millions of Asians and Africans who fought in the trenches of the western front and frozen eastern forests during WWI. As imperial powers at Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 Paris Peace Conference denied colonies self rule they became more likely to prefer communism. After WWII former colonies knew that development was needed to compete, but chose central organization over individual liberties. Europe’s faith in liberalism was shaken, but US power and the rhetoric of freedom and democracy grew.

Niall Ferguson is excoriated as neo-imperialist and racist, earning Mishra threats of a libel lawsuit. A culture of Islamophobia is revisited in the writings of Aayan Hirsi Ali, Bat Ye’or and others seen from the perspective of Muslim guest workers invited to Europe after WWII. Salman Rushdie’s memoir of life on the run after a death decree by Ayatollah Khomeini seem delusions of a celebrity western spokesman. British withdrawal from the EU is compared to the 1947 retreat from India, in terms of a reckless rush towards an unknown outcome.

An American author writes about life inside a Mumbai slum, situated between a new airport and luxury apartments built by the slum dwellers. Canadian pop shrink and YouTube guru Jordan Peters turns fascism and mysticism against gender identity politics, and freaks out at Mishra on Twitter. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Barack Obama become liberal bait, as social redress is switched for drone strikes, corporate bailouts and immigrant deportations. Trump’s rise was presaged by a catastrophic loss of jobs, pensions, and homes by the lower middle class.

Mishra uses these reviews as launch pads for political exposition. It is a difficult book to read, partly for it’s take on liberalism, but also for it’s fleeting literary references. While nothing appears positive in this analysis of the west, it’s an intriguing door to peer behind. Democracy, human rights and free trade may well be hollow words of a cynical elitist narrative. On another hand, what are the alternatives: autocracy, arbitrary justice and planned economies? Democratic socialism might be one answer, but Mishra doesn’t quite come out and say so.

Review #3

Bland Fanatics is indeed a fascinating book- a series of essays about the hypocrisy of the Western liberal bourgeoisie and its host of paid intellectuals. These “Bland Fanatics” underwrote imperialism, the spread of inequality, and ecological destruction while donning the garb of liberalism, values, and decency.

Review #4

Honesty and assertion of truth are two fundamental requirements for an intellectual. Pankaj Mishra certainly possesses both these qualities which are glaringly visible in almost all of his writings from “Butter Chicken in Ludhiana” to “Bland Fanatics”. The book under review is a collection of more than a dozen essays written by Pankaj Mishra during last ten years and published mainly in leading newspapers and journals in United Kingdom & United States. This book covers a wide range of ideas from politics to culture, imperialism to Neo-imperialism and liberalism to the end of liberalism in a very forceful manner. The most important essays are- Watch this man, the culture of fear, Bland Fanatics, Free markets and social darwinism in Mumbai, Bumbling Chumocrats, The Economist and Liberalism and England’s Last Roar. The book opens with an essay where the author has entered into a forceful debate with a renowned Scottish historian Niall Ferguson in whom he finds an intellectual representative of Neo-imperialism. The author has also beautifully reflected on the hypocrisy of liberals when it comes to race, empire, political establishments and disadvantaged sections both in west and the east including India.
This acclaimed author and a leading intellectual seems to spare none when he uses a term ‘intellectual quacks’ to highlight those who have appeared in public space during the second half of the 20th century with certain sparkling ideas presented in the public space and a huge gullible number got swayed by the empty bowl of so called wisdom. He has wonderfully coined and used touching phrases such as ‘intellectual entrepreneurs’, ‘vendors of spirituality’, ‘stalls in the new marketplace of ideas’, ‘healers of modern man’s soul’ and ‘mass market musings’. He has deeply touched the foundation stones on which these intellectual cheer leaders came to acquire immense following and fanatically loyal fan clubs. In short, the nuances of modern fascination with myth and the clever attempts to push the reality aside, have been explored and explained fantastically by the author of this heart-touching piece of intellectual feast. Since these essays were originally written for the public in the west which is very well informed, the level of analysis is of a higher standard and hence slightly difficult to understand as it is very rich both in contentual & contextual zones.
However, the book doesn’t generate that level of interest which his earlier books particularly ” From the Ruins of Empire” and “Age of Anger” did perhaps because it is a collection of essays and not a thematic work. But each page of this book is a remarkable indicator of the astute intellectualism of this leading essayist and cultural critic of our times. If you wish to go for an intellectual ride, you have a good option available in “Bland Fanatics”