Pankaj Mishra: Palestine and the ruins of Western journalism

“In the beginning was the press and then the world appeared,” Karl Kraus wrote in 1921. The biblical allusion was no rhetorical flourish. Living through an apocalyptic era, the Austrian writer, and arguably the first major media critic, had reason to believe that journalism had moved from being a neutral filter between the popular imagination and the external world. It had taken charge of forging reality itself.

Kraus’s critique had assumed sharper focus during World War I, when he began to blame newspapers for deepening the disaster they were meant to be reporting on. “How is the world ruled and led to war?” Kraus asked, arguing that the origin of the 20th century’s seminal war lay in a continent-wide collapse, triggered by the press, of cognitive and imaginative faculties, which allowed European nations to blunder into a war they could neither anticipate nor stop. “Through decades of practice,” he wrote, “[the reporter] has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself.”

It may seem easy to look down, from our higher and well-furnished vantage point, on the parochial world of Viennese periodicals that Kraus fulminated against. But as ferocious wars rage unstoppably in Europe and the Middle East, threatening wider conflagrations, and rending the social fabric of several societies, Kraus’s critique of the fourth estate, the so-called pillar of democracy, not only becomes more pertinent. It resonates as a broader analysis of the decay of democratic institutions in the West.

Their innate fragility was evident long ago to the Asian and African subjects of European colonialists. Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, who saw democracy as literally the rule of the people, insisted that it was merely “nominal” in the west. It could possess no reality so long as “the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists” and voters “take their cue from their newspapers which are often dishonest”.

An equally blunt assessment today would conclude that a large part of the digital media, trafficking in fake news and conspiracy theories, is now systematically dishonest. The mainstream press, often owned by big business tycoons, maintains its pretensions to political and ethical responsibility, claiming to be a beacon in the darkness where democracy supposedly dies. But the evidence of its inadequacy and even corruption has accumulated rapidly and ominously during my own three decades in journalism.

My career as a writer of literary nonfiction really began with the war on terror, the seminal war of our own century, which devastated large parts of Asia and Africa, and eviscerated civil liberties in the West before finally ending in the humiliating Western retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. Early in 2001, I had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan on behalf of Granta and the New York Review of Books. My long articles based on these travels appeared soon after September 11; and, consequently, many in the American and European media came to see me as a “terrorism expert”.

I didn’t reject this absurd label as vehemently as I should have. There were, back then, very few writers of non-Western origin in the Anglo-American press; bigoted screeds against Islam filled the op-ed pages; and I felt oppressed by a sense of responsibility. Though I recoiled from the puerile question, “why do they hate us?” I wanted to do whatever I could to resist the further brutalising of profoundly damaged societies like Afghanistan and Iraq and the demonising of minorities in the West.

As it happened, I could only look on incredulously as the BBC screened in prime time a documentary about the globally beneficial effects of the British Empire. In my own writings for Western periodicals, I felt myself under pressure to not depart too much from their broad consensus: that the simultaneous invasion of multiple countries was just, righteous, and necessary, aimed at liberating their populations, especially women, from cruel oppressors and advancing democracy.

And I could only watch helplessly as the most respectable parts of the Western press not only egged on a war based on fraud, but also helped heavily racialise it. In the fantasies of far-right nationalists today, a dark-skinned sub-human enemy, presently gorging on pet animals, stands ready to destroy white western civilization. But fantasies of violence against this swarthy nemesis flourished for years among so-called legacy periodicals and liberal intellectuals.

“Time to Think about Torture,” Newsweek declared a few weeks after September 11. “Focused brutality,” Time recommended. As the invasion of Iraq got underway, The Atlantic laid out the advantages of “torture lite” in a cover story. In the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff not only urged Americans to embrace their imperial destiny and invade Iraq: this professor of human rights also defined how black and brown bodies could be subjected to “forms of sleep deprivation” and “disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce stress”. The article appeared inconveniently just as the first pictures of hooded prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison emerged.

The impunity with which Israel murdered nearly 200 writers, academics, and journalists in Gaza, after banning foreign reporters from the scene of the executions, was granted to the country by its Western supporters soon after September 11. In 2002, after Israel bombed and destroyed a broadcasting centre in the West Bank, Anne Applebaum, a prominent critic today of “autocracy”, asserted that “the official Palestinian media is the right place for Israel to focus its ire”. Trump’s “Muslim ban” and JD Vance’s violent fantasies seem outrageous only if one forgets that in 2006 Martin Amis conspiratorially confided to a London Times journalist his “definite urge” to say things like, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.”

Today, the war on terror is widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. But it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco: an attempt by the Western media as well as the political class to forge reality itself, which failed catastrophically, but not without embedding cruelty and mendacity deep and enduringly in public life. And partly because this disaster was unacknowledged – editors and writers pushing false narratives, and cheerleading large-scale violence, remained entrenched, and even received promotions – it is being reenacted today in the Western media’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza: another war that has ignited a bonfire of international legal and moral norms and deadened and perverted consciences.

The historian Omer Bartov has pointed out that Israel, ostensibly responding to an unprecedented terrorist attack from Hamas, sought from the very beginning “to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory”. Today, with all the 2,000-pound bombs lavished on them by the United States, Israel’s far-right leaders seek to further militarise their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and to provoke their enemies, through acts of terrorism, in Lebanon and Iran into a wider war. But all these obvious realities, and even the liquidation of Gaza, which unlike many atrocities, has been livestreamed by both its perpetrators and victims, are daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the main organs of the Western media.

Palestinians and Arabs have known for decades the many hidden red lines constraining discussion of Israel’s trajectory. My own sporadic attempts to tackle the subject in the past made me aware of an insidious Western regimen of repressions and prohibitions. But it isn’t just non-Western perspectives like mine that are being suppressed or unheeded. Senior editors in the West, as has become clearer lately, seem to have decreed a broader proscription while trying to preserve their pretzel logic: that, as Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, put it, “the best chance of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is to support Israel”.

In garish contrast to the clear identification of Russian barbarity in Ukraine, the passive voice is the preferred mode in Western reports of Israeli atrocities, making it harder to see who is doing what to whom, and in what circumstances. (“The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome” was the initial headline of a BBC report on Israeli soldiers unleashing an attack dog on a disabled Palestinian and then leaving him to die.) The New York Times’ report on a grim landmark, the killing by Israel of thirty thousand Palestinians, overwhelmingly women and children, was headlined “Lives Ended in Gaza”. A more recent report on the Israeli regime of starvation by the Associated Press is titled “A 10-month-old Palestinian baby suddenly stopped crawling. Polio had struck Gaza”.

Unverified reports, eventually exposed as false, of beheaded Israeli babies were given prominence by journalists as well as the US President. They have together drawn a veil of silence over the multiple documented reports of rape and torture in Israeli prisons. An article in The Atlantic, presently edited by a former IDF operative and peddler of a notoriously false report about Iraq, could argue, even after the murder of thousands of children in Gaza, that “it is possible to kill children legally”.

Certainly, the Western media’s account of Israel’s “self-defense” yet again exposes the radical discrepancy between what is said by mainstream journalists in the West and what the rest of us see happening in the world. I cannot avoid a sense of deja vu, and an old question: is it still possible to enlarge cognitive capacity within the dwindling kingdom of Western journalism – the enchanted realm in which I have profitably spent most of my own life?

After all, we inhabit a much bigger world than the one inhabited by Karl Kraus in early 20th-century Vienna, with infinitely greater variety of experiences and perspectives. There is a lot more demographic diversity in publishing and media offices than when I started out as a writer. Could the continuing intellectual and moral debacles of journalism be avoided by a less conformist climate of opinion, and an openness to different experiences and viewpoints?

Perhaps, but the first step in this direction is to acknowledge the formidable obstacles ahead: we live in a very confusing time, and it is especially bewildering for an older generation of Western journalists and commentators. They came of age in the decades after the end of the cold war, and the collapse of communism, when Western-style democracy and capitalism seemed to define the future of the entire world.

Today, each one of the assumptions that underpinned western policymaking and journalism for nearly three decades lie shattered. We live in a world where the future of democracy is not assured even in Europe and America, let alone India. Western-style capitalism has generated far too much inequality and now engenders a vicious backlash. Demagogues and despotic leaders are in the ascendant. Most disturbingly, white nationalism is yet again, after a long hiatus, the explicit ideology of mainstream political parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

At a time of widespread economic distress, ethnonationalists in the United States and United Kingdom as well as Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Italy are united by their antipathy to immigrants, and targeting of institutions deemed insufficiently patriotic or indulgent of sexual, ethnic and racial minorities. This bleak scenario can be further elaborated. The main economic ideologies of endless growth and global prosperity have come up against environmental constraints and technological innovation, as well as built-in limits, and look unsustainable.

Editors and writers in hallowed periodicals were never mentally prepared for the collapse of their ideology of capitalist globalisation and the rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige. They were too attached, by national and class origin, and training, to the intellectual assumptions developed during the unchallenged hegemony of the West. Personally too implicated in the death-agonies of the old world, they cannot now feel the birth-pangs of the new. Indeed, they struggle to comprehend their own societies as these drastically change around them; they obsess over mere symptoms of a splintered social consensus such as “culture wars” and end up wringing meaning out of abstractions like “populism,” “democratic backsliding,” and “crisis of liberalism”.

A greater problem is that intellectual as well as political elites in the West have very few means to understand, let alone explain, the rest of the world. Mainstream journalists try to capture the speed and scale of an ongoing world-historical transformation – the rise of the Global South – through quantitative analysis. They offer statistics about the growing share of foreign trade of China, the expanding size of the Indian, Brazilian and Indonesian economies.

But these facts and figures are mere surface ripples on the spate of global change, which is sweeping away all that we once knew to be true.

We inhabit a world that differs radically, in all its political mentalities and emotional outlooks as well as economic structures, from the world that existed just two decades ago. History has always been a clash between stories in which people aspire to recognise themselves. Our preferred story about the past orients us to the world as it is, offers us a place and an identity, and broadly explains our feelings of possibility. The widely used framework of Western journalism was built on Western triumphs – defeats of totalitarian regimes in two world wars, the postwar taming of Germany, Italy and Japan, and then victory over communism in the cold war, followed by the worldwide dissemination of western-style capitalism and democracy. This rare experience of progress in the post-war West made it possible for its beneficiaries to generalise, optimistically, about changes in the rest of world, and the West’s own capacity to direct them.

But this story in which several generations of Western journalists flatteringly recognised themselves now clashes with another, much bigger, more resonant and persuasive story: of decolonisation, the central event of the 20th century for the vast majority of the human population.

The word was first used to describe the historical process that began in the 1940s, when the “darker peoples” (WEB Du Bois’s phrase) of Asia and Africa began to liberate themselves from direct and indirect Western rule. But it now denotes more than just world-historical shifts of political and economic power. Decolonization serves as a shorthand for describing the way many non-white people, including many African Americans and immigrant populations in the West, locate themselves in a longer historical continuum—the way they see their past and measure their potential in the future.

Certainly, if there is an analytical framework that can explain a broad range of domestic and international phenomenon – from the rise of Chinese nationalism and the upsurge of the far-right in the West, to culture wars in Europe and North America, disarray over Gaza at American universities, schisms at PEN America, or Kylie Jenner’s loss of nearly one million Instagram followers – it is decolonization.

This is why Western leaders and commentators, especially those too absorbed by the post-1989 fantasy of the end of history, are called upon to respond to not only a crucial historical dynamic: the rebalancing of Western power that was originally built through imperialism. They are also obliged to understand the many different cultural and psychological ways through which this rebalancing is manifested.

Needless to say, this is a tall order. For even some rudimentary facts of global history – imperialism, decolonisation – are not so easily discovered: they languish in darkness behind the monumental Plato-to-NATO narratives about Western civilisation. I remember that when, in the 1990s, I started publishing in Europe and America, writers and journalists commonly presented their countries as spiritual heirs of Athenian democracy, Renaissance individualism and Enlightenment rationality.

One could read millions of words on the merits of Western democracy and liberalism and the evils of Eastern totalitarianism by such intellectual luminaries of Anglo-America as Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, Martin Amis, Thomas Friedman and Anne Applebaum without encountering a paragraph on the consequences of slavery, imperialism, and decolonisation. They seemed fixated with the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but these so-called liberal internationalists barely manifested any awareness of the modern Western history of mass bondage, colonial dispossession and genocidal wars against indigenous peoples.

Such ignorance, an affordable luxury once, would be fatal today for a younger generation of journalists and commentators: they confront a global order where democracy and liberalism, or even ordinary political stability, are no longer a given. They are required to see the world as it is, without the cold war imperative to prettify one’s own side. They are in one sense forced to accurately chart our fragmented geopolitical and cultural landscape, and to recognise its multiple histories and geographies and newly emerging constellation of forces.

This would mean, first and foremost, recognising that what united the disparate struggles of the wretched of the earth – and has survived the post-colonial failures of many nation-states – was a shared conviction that racial privilege should no longer underpin the global order. Today, assertive, even aggressive, histories and worldviews in the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, are radically challenging dominant Western assumptions. History was supposed to have ended in the triumph of western-style liberalism and capitalism. Today, however, the members of a non-western intelligentsia – an architect in Jakarta, a doctor in Kuala Lumpur, a lawyer in Mumbai, a sociologist in Istanbul, an economist in Doha, a professor in Lahore, a student in Cape Town – seek to articulate their own experiences, explore their own histories and traditions.

They can see that leaders, policymakers, and journalists responsible for the West’s calamitous wars remain unaccountable to this day. They can also see the great contrast between the West’s generous hospitality to Ukrainian refugees and the walls and fences European countries and the United States build to keep out darker-skinned victims of their own wars.

They remember that the West not only denied poorer countries the technology to make their own vaccines during a long and destructive pandemic; it hoarded vaccines past their sell-by date. Such “vaccine apartheid” cost millions of lives in Asia, Africa and Latin America and confirmed yet again in many eyes that the West seeks always to protect its own interests under the guise of a universalist rhetoric of democracy and human rights.

We see this heightened consciousness very clearly today in the furious rejection by the non-Western world of Israel’s and the West’s violence in the Middle East. The seemingly irreconcilable antagonism between Israelis and Palestinians is mapped on one of the most treacherous fault lines of modern history: the “colour line”, described by WEB Du Bois as the central problem of international politics, “the question as to how far differences of race will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilisation”. Outrage grows explosively among the global majority as a western proxy in the Middle East demonstrates the ease with which black and brown bodies can still be seized, broken, and destroyed outside all norms and laws of war.

Long before the war erupted, and coverage of it became brazenly mendacious, people of non-Western ancestry were making urgent demands to decolonise Western systems of knowledge, and a change in the self-image of the former empires that enforced white supremacy. This involves an overhaul of public cultures, from replacements of place names, statues and museum holdings to refining of academic curricula, journalism and political rhetoric.

Understandably, this makeover is unacceptable to many in the West. Their response is to double down on failed ideas and shattered assumptions, and scramble to reinforce the structures of inequality that benefitted them. White nationalism in politics today has come to have a sinister counterpart in the cultural realms that seeks to stamp out intellectual diversity even while paying lip service to demographic pluralism.

We have seen this despotic power at work in the attempt by many in Western political, corporate, and media classes to suppress scholarly and artistic explorations of racism and imperialism. We see it now in the crackdown on ordinary political dissent. A lecture I was scheduled to give on Israel, Gaza, and the West for the London Review of Books was pre-emptively canceled by its hosts, London’s Barbican Center. Coming to Canada, I have discovered more instances of people who try to resist the enforced depoliticisation of literature and arts and find themselves ostracised.

In 2018, The New York Times called Wanda Nanibush “one of the most powerful voices for Indigenous culture in the North American art world”. And then last year she abruptly disappeared, after some Instagram posts on Palestine, ominously reminiscent of the way even very powerful people used to be airbrushed out of public life in totalitarian societies.

Naomi Klein writes that “the extraordinary raids, arrests and property seizures of the Indigo 11 represent an attack on political speech the likes of which I have not seen in Canada in my lifetime”. Is it merely coincidental that the Globe and Mail deleted all references to Israel from this speech while proposing to publish an excerpt?

The South African writer Kagiso Lesego Molope asked at the Writer’s Trust gala in Toronto a few months ago, “The time is coming when the world will start to apologise for what is happening – and when that time comes we will be asked: what did you do with your power?” It is a question that all individuals and institutions have to ask ourselves. But many of them have, at best, assumed the posture of those Democratic delegates in Chicago who plugged their ears to the names of dead Palestinian children as they walked out of the convention centre.

At worst, a range of western institutions – from Ivy League universities to public broadcasters – have resorted to patently anti-democratic measures, violating their own principles of freedom of conscience and speech. Yesterday, the University of California put on its website a list of military weaponry it seeks in order to wage war on its students: the list includes 3,000 rounds of pepper munitions, 500 rounds of 40mm impact munitions, 12 drones, and nine grenade launchers.

I wrote in late February that we are seeing some kind of collapse in the free world. The evidence has accumulated with ominous frequency since then. Perhaps it should not be surprising. The intellectual incompetence and moral turpitude of the fourth estate was diagnosed right from the time Kraus warned against “the intellectual self-annihilation of mankind by means of its press”. Looking ahead to our own era, Gandhi predicted that even “the states that are today nominally democratic” are likely to “become frankly totalitarian” since a regime in which “the weakest go to the wall” and a “few capitalist owners” thrive “cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open.” Vaclav Havel, celebrated as an anticommunist “dissident” in the West, actually argued in his essay “Politics and Conscience” (1984) that totalitarian systems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe represented the future of the Western world; he warned against the power that operates “outside all conscience, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalise anything without ever having to brush against the truth”.

It is our fate to watch helplessly how a power operating outside all conscience and grounded in ideological fictions can rationalise even a livestreamed genocide. I certainly feel even less confident after Gaza about the possibility of recovering from the post-truth age. My own contributions to literary and intellectual journalism over three decades now seem very insignificant, disproportionate to the recognition and material rewards I have received.

But I cannot fail to recognise how urgently we need fresh ideas about how to rethink our past, and to chart our way out of the present into a liveable future. I strongly believe that they will come from a younger generation of writers, artists, and journalists. I also know that as our polycrisis – inescapable wars, climate disasters, and political earthquakes – deepens, our longings for a vivid and fair description of the world will become even more irrepressible; and many of us will feel compelled to fulfill them.

There are many writers and journalists who won’t join us in this essential task. These are the writers, academics, and journalists killed by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces]. I cannot get over the fact that the extrajudicial executions of our colleagues, and the destruction of schools, universities, and libraries in Gaza, are still largely unacknowledged by literary, academic, and journalistic communities in the West.

Increasingly, it seems that, as Arundhati Roy pointed out, “the only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihoods”.

Today, I must join those trying to break the inhuman shackles on our minds and souls. I dedicate this prize to the memory of writers murdered in Gaza. I have already given away much of the money that comes with it, and I will give away the rest, to writers and journalists in Palestine. Thank you.

This a transcription of a lecture delivered by Pankaj Mishra, winner of the 2024 Weston International Award, at the Royal Ontario Museum on September 16.

This article was first published on n+1.