Tag: imperialism

UNIVERSALISM, RELATIVISM AND QATAR

December 1, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on universalism, relativism and the debate about human rights in Qatar, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 27 November 2022, under the headline “It can be hard to distinguish the cultural claims of right and left. Just look at Qatar”. “Everyone has their beliefs and cultures. We welcome and respect that. All we ask is that other people do the same for us.” So insists Yasir al-Jamal, deputy general secretary of the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee for Delivery and […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Sport • Tags: cultural imperialism, cultural relativism, enlightenment, fifa, herder, imperialism, qatar, qatar world cup, racism, universalism

IMMIGRATION POLICIES AND REDRAWING BORDERS

April 28, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on how Western immigration policies are undermining the sovereignty of poorer nations, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 24 April 2022, under the headline “In this new age of empire, the west has no need to conquer. Money and coercion do the job”. Where is America’s southern border? Look on a map and you can see the line where America ends and Mexico begins, a line along part of which Donald Trump tried to build his […]

Categories: International, Race & Immigration • Tags: deportation, empire of borders, european union, immigration controls, immigration policy, imperialism, rwanda, sovereignty, usa

MAKING EMPIRE ETHICAL

October 31, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This is a review of Priya Satia’s Time’s Monster, published in the Observer, 25 October 2020. In his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, written in 1963 while in prison for having taken part in a banned march against segregation, Martin Luther King Jr describes receiving a letter from a “white brother in Texas” who had told him that “all Christians know that the coloured people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History • Tags: anti-colonialism, british empire, colonialism, enlightenment, ethics, imperialism, james mill, john stuart mill, priya satia, thomas macaulay, time's monster

ILLUMINATING AND OBSCURING

August 8, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This is a review of Pankaj Mishra’s Bland Fanatics, published in the Observer, 2 August 2020. ‘What is it’, the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth asked rhetorically in 1927, in a preface to his book The Wandering Jews, ‘that allows European states to go spreading civilisation and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?’ Forty years later, as American cities burned while American bombs rained down on Vietnam, James Baldwin made a similar point, though reversing Roth’s formulation. ‘A racist […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: anti-imperialism, bland fanatics, imperialism, liberalism, pankaj mishra, racism, the age of anger

THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF WHITE IDENTITY

March 16, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave to the Literarisches Colloqium Berlin on 5 March 2019. Identity politics is one of the defining – and one of the most divisive – issues of our age. And no identity is more contested or fought over than white identity. For some it is a means of giving voice to a group whose identity has previously been denied. For others it is simply as an expression of racism. The political context […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: black identity, blumenbach, democracy, enlightenment, governor eyre, haitian revolution, herder, identity politics, immigration, immigration controls, imperialism, nouvelle droite, racial science, racism, universalism, white identity, working class

BRITAIN AND THE COVERT WAR IN YEMEN 1962-70

January 11, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This is an extract from Mark Curtis’ superb book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses. It tells the story of Britain’s secret war in Yemen in the 1960s to restore the monarchy and Saudi control, and to protect its interests, and military base, in the region. Some 200,000 people were killed in the war. Curtis’study provides essential background to today’s conflict in Yemen. It was, Harold Macmillan observed at the time, ‘repugnant to political equity and prudence alike that […]

Categories: Britain, History, International • Tags: britain, british imperialism, imperialism, mark curtis, saudi arabia, yemen

ON MORALITY AND ITS HISTORY

August 10, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? These are the questions at the heart of The Quest for a Moral Compass. And these are the questions I want to explore tonight. For some, the questions themselves might seem absurd. It is striking that there are thousands of books about the […]

Categories: History, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, christianity, enlightenment, europe, french revolution, greek philosophy, haitian revolution, history of moral thought, human agency, human nature, imperialism, modernity, monotheism, morality, nietzsche, plato, radical enlightenment, thrasymachus, viktor frankl

THE MAKING OF THE MUSLIM WORLD

June 12, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a review of Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason (Bodley Head), Cemil Aydin’s The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press) and Tariq Ramadan’s Islam: The Essentials (Pelican). It was published in the New Statesman, 9 June 2017. ‘The Turkish nation,’ Mehmed Ziya Gokalp wrote, ‘belongs to the Ural-Altai [language] group of peoples, to the Islamic umma, and to Western internationalism.’ Gokalp was an early-20th-century sociologist, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books • Tags: enlightenment, europe, imperialism, islam, islamic enlightenment, islamism, modernity, tariq ramadan, west

ON THE QUEST FOR A MORAL COMPASS

January 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the text of my talk at the Galle Literary Festival Last week. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? These are the questions at the heart of what I want to explore today. For some, the questions themselves might seem absurd. There is a widespread perception of morality as occupying a sphere of its own. We imagine that morality can, and should, be understood in its […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, chinese philosophy, christianity, enlightenment, ethics, europe, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, human agency, human nature, imperialism, modernity, monotheism, nietzsche, plato, radical enlightenment, thrasymachus, viktor frankl

RECOLONIZED BY THE PAST

January 13, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for Al Jazeera English is about the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in Oxford. It began as a campaign at the University of Cape Town to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood on the campus. For the protestors, the statue represented everything that Rhodes himself stood for: racism, colonialism, plunder, white supremacy, and the oppression of black people. Last April, a month after the protests began, the university authorities removed the statue. By then, the protests had moved […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties • Tags: anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, cecil rhodes, imperialism, racism

AFTER PARIS

November 15, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Solidarity and anger. Those were my immediate emotions, watching the carnage unfold on the streets of Paris. Solidarity with the people of Paris, anger at the depraved, nihilistic savagery of the terrorists. Those remain my main emotions, even now. But, beyond solidarity and anger, we need also analysis. So here are two articles, thinking through some of the issues. The first looks at, and challenges, two popular explanations for why the carnage was unleashed – Western foreign policy, on the […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Politics, War on terror • Tags: anti-imperialism, assimilationism, british politics, france, imperialism, islamic state, islamism, jihadism, multiculturalism, syria, terrorism

HOW A BUNCH OF VICIOUS CHANCERS BECAME MEN OF WISDOM

January 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

‘The world has lost a revered leader’, claimed US Secretary of John Kerry on the death last week of Saudi King Abdullah, a ‘man of wisdom and vision’, in Kerry’s words. David Cameron praised his ‘commitment to peace’ and ordered flags to be flown at half mast on government buildings. Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, even hailed him as a proto-feminist, a ‘strong advocate of women’. In reality, the man that virtually every Western leader has […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, International • Tags: arab world, imperialism, islam, islamism, saudi arabia, wahhabism, western policy

GERMANY AND BRITAIN, MEMORY AND MYOPIA

October 24, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the International New York Times, published under the headline ‘Germany’s history lesson for Britain’. You can read the full version in in INYT. Ernst Barlach was one of Germany’s great expressionist artists of the early twentieth century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to the First World War, Barlach found that his experience of the Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering that he saw […]

Categories: Britain, History, International • Tags: britain, british museum, britishness, ernst barlach, first world war, germany, holocaust, imperialism, second world war

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ORNAMENTALISM

August 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I am away for a couple of weeks, so the next few posts will be from the archives – old material that I have not previously published on Pandaemonium. All will, in fact, be book reviews that explore themes of race, difference and identity. This first is a review of David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism, first published in the New Statesman, 7 May 2001. . Review of David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Allen Lane, 2001) In October 1865, […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, History • Tags: british empire, david cannadine, edward said, equality, imperialism, orientalism, racism, universalism

THE FORGOTTEN ROOTS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

May 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This essay is published in the summer issue of New Humanist. The nations of the world, claimed Lord Salisbury in a speech to the Primrose League at the Albert Hall in 1898, were divided into the ‘living’ and the ‘dying’. The ‘living’ were the ‘white’ nations – the European powers, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ‘dying’ comprised the rest of the world. ‘The living nations’, Salisbury claimed, ‘will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’ and from […]

Categories: Britain, History • Tags: britain, first world war, germany, imperialism, opium wars, racial science, racism