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The
historian Tony Judt described his generation – as epitomised by Bush and Blair –
as “crappy”. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian.
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A generation of failed politicians has trapped the west in a tawdry nightmare. By Pankaj Mishra. The Guardian, January 1, 2016.
Mishra:
In one of his last interviews, the historian Tony Judt lamented his “catastrophic” Anglo-American generation, whose cossetted members included George W Bush and Tony Blair. Having grown up after the defining wars and hatreds of the west’s 20th century, “in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political”, these historically weightless elites believed that “no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences”.
A
member of the Bush administration brashly affirmed its arrogance of power in
2004 after what then seemed a successful invasion of Iraq: “When we act,” he
boasted, “we create our own reality.” A “pretty crappy generation”, Judt
concluded, “when you come to think of it.”
One
cannot but think of the reality it made as mayhem in Asia and Africa reaches
European and North American cities. But those of us from countries where many
Anglo-American institutions were once admirable models have their own
melancholy reasons to reflect on their swift decay.
As
another annus horribilis lurched to a close, the evidence of moral and
intellectual sloth seemed unavoidable. In the Christmas issue of the Spectator,
Rod Liddle described Calais as “a jungle of largely Muslim asylum seekers
aching to get into Britain – presumably to be hugged” by “the liberals”. In an
interview in the same issue, the prime minister confessed that Liddle “does make me laugh”. The chumminess seemed to confirm Amit Chaudhuri’s strong recent
“impression”, acquired from BBC documentaries about India, that Britain comprises
“male buddies”, whose “capacity for spontaneous insight isn’t that far away
from that of Jeremy Clarkson”.
It was
still hard not to be puzzled by the casual malevolence of the lead headline in
the Times on Boxing Day: “Muslims ‘silent on terror’”. A few days earlier,
candidates in the Republican presidential primaries, aspiring leaders of the
free world, had offered the following modest proposals: ban Muslims from
travel, kill families of terrorists, shoot down Russian planes, close down
parts of the internet, carpet-bomb Syria.
Power,
it seems, does a lot more than corrupt; it also coarsens and stultifies. Judt’s
diagnosis of an unbearable lightness of being also applies to many younger
people exalted into positions of influence by the accident of their birth in
rich and powerful countries – members of ruling classes who assumed that
history ended in 1989 with the fall of communism and their unchallenged
supremacy.
It is
possible to feel slight relief that at least the current chief operator of
America’s war machine was originally formed, intellectually and emotionally, by
an experience of the world common to most of humanity: one of powerlessness and
marginality. As his approval ratings sank last month, Barack Obama
exasperatedly insisted that American leadership “is not just a matter of us bombing somebody”. He is worldly enough to realise that, as his hero James
Baldwin wrote during the futile American bombing of Indochina: “Force does not
work the way its advocates seem to think it does.” Instead of impressing its
victim, it reveals to him “the weakness, even the panic of his adversary and
this revelation invests the victim with patience”.
Thus
al-Qaida assumed its most vicious form where it had never existed, and then
morphed into Daesh and me-too franchises in numerous countries. The
auto-intoxicated teenage murderer now confounds the leaden cold war holdovers
stalking “extremist ideology”. “It is ultimately fatal,” Baldwin warned, “to
create too many victims.” For then, “however long the battle may go on” the
wielder of superior firepower “can never be the victor; on the contrary, all
his energies, his life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a
mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win”.
This is
the treacherous impasse to which 14 years of escalating wars and bombing
campaigns have brought us. The refusal to learn from their failures should have
broadly suggested that “the establishment”, as a secret Pentagon memo in 1967
to President Lyndon Johnson suggested, “is out of its mind”. But such brutal
self-assessments belong to another time of shame, guilt and responsibility,
when tainted public figures tended to slink, or be pushed, into obscurity.
The
modern west has been admirably different from other civilisations in its
ability to counterbalance the arrogance of power with recognition of its
excesses. Now, however, it is not only the bankers who radically expand our
notion of impunity. Their chums in politics and the media coax, with criminal
irresponsibility, the public into deeper fear and insecurity – and into blaming
their overall plight on various enemies (immigrants, budding terrorists in
Calais’s jungle, an un-American alien in the White House, Muslims and darkies
in general).
Racism,
a beast cornered if not tamed after much struggle, has lumbered back to civil
society in the solemn guise of “reforming” Islam. Tony Blair summons us to
worldwide battle on behalf of western values while embodying, with his central
Asian clients, their comprehensive negation. The handful of media institutions
and individuals that are not obliged to flesh out Rupert Murdoch’s tweets on Muslims seem to be struggling to remain viable in an increasingly retrogressive
political culture. Even the BBC seems determined not to stray far from the
Daily Mail’s editorial line.
Unsurprisingly,
we witness, as Judt pointed out, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people,
only the political class breeding itself”. “The old ways of mass movements,
communities organised around an ideology, even religious or political ideas,
trade unions and political parties to leverage public opinion into political
influence” have disappeared. Indeed, the slightest reminder of this democratic
past incites the technocrats of politics, business and the media into paroxysms
of scorn.
Having
acted recklessly to create their own reality, they have managed to trap all of
us in a tawdry nightmare – a male buddy film of singular fatuousness. At the
same time, reality-making has ceased to be the prerogative of the American
imperium or of the French and British chumocrats, who lost their empires long
ago and are still trying to find a role for themselves.
Some
random fanatic, it turns out, can make their reality far more quickly, coercing
the world’s oldest democracies into endless war, racial-religious hatred and
paranoia. Such is the great power surrendered by the crappy generation and its
epigones. The generations to come will scarcely believe it.
