I’ve been reading Hamad Dabashi’s thought-provoking new book After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization. It is a very useful documentation of, and reflection upon, the extreme savagery of Israel’s (still-ongoing) genocide in Gaza and also, importantly, what the very active support that many “Western” nations have given to this genocide tells us about the culture or “civilization” of the West. Throughout the book, Dabashi provides long excerpts from both the poignant “resignation letter” on Gaza that the former UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber penned to his UN bosses in late October 2023 and from Sven Lindqvist’s landmark 1992 book ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness…
I heartily recommend that everyone read Dabashi’s book, but I have a couple of quibbles. One is just to note that we are by no means yet “After” the savagery of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. If I were publishing the book I would have urged another title, such as In a Time of Savagery… I have also seen news of a book by Pankaj Mishra titled The World After Gaza, which has received mixed notices. The world is not yet “after” Gaza, or Israel’s pursuit of savagery therein… I think what we can say at this point, even as Israel’s savagery in Gaza continues, is that the first two years of the genocide and the behavior of various world powers during those years has already provided humankind with a shockingly rich trove of evidence about the savagery of this Israeli government, of the Zionist political project of which it is a product– and that of those “Western” and other powers that have actively aided the genocide.
And who know what the coming months or years will reveal about these matters?
Continue reading “The long marriage of financial speculation, settler colonialism, and savagery”