Mahmood Mamdani Quotes

With the changing ownership of media giants, several have been taken over by corporations based in the defense or entertainment industry, reinforcing the tendency to treat news as marketable entertainment. Yet another reason for the continuing erosion of press freedom arises from the common sense that the press shares with those in power.

Hodgson should have added that the division of the world into "the West" and "the East," "Europe and Asia" left out a third part - in the words of the Yale historian Christopher Miller, "a blank darkness" - that was said to lack history or civilization because it lacked either great texts or great monuments. This blank darkness comprised Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, and the lands of the Pacific, excepting, of course, Egypt and Ethiopia - which for this purpose were classified as belonging to Asia.

Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting.

We need to distinguish between two contrasting narratives of Culture Talk. One thinks of premodern peoples as those who are not yet modern, who are either lagging behind or have yet to embark on the road to modernity. The other depicts the premodern as also the antimodern. Whereas the former conception encourages relations based on philanthropy, the latter notion is productive of fear and preemptive police or military action.
The difference is clear if we contrast earlier depictions of Africans with contemporary talk about Muslims. During the Cold War, Africans were stigmatized as the prime example of peoples not capable of modernity. With the end of the Cold War, Islam and the Middle East have displaced Africa as the hard premodern core in a rapidly globalizing world. The difference in the contemporary perception of black Africa and Middle Eastern Islam is this: whereas Africa is seen as incapable of modernity, hard-core Islam is seen as not only incapable of but also resistant to modernity. Whereas Africans are said to victimize themselves, hard-core Muslims are said to be prone to taking others along to the world beyond.

Before 9/11, I thought that tragedy had the potential to connect us with humanity in ways that prosperity does not. I thought that if prosperity tends to isolate, tragedy must connect. Now I realize that this is not always the case. One unfortunate response to tragedy is a self-righteousness about one's own condition, a seeking proof of one's special place in the world, even in victimhood. One afternoon, I shared these thoughts with a new colleague, the Israeli vice chancellor of the Budapest-based Central European University. When he told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz, I asked him what lesson he had drawn from this great crime. He explained that, like all victims of Auschwitz, he, too, had said, "Never again." In time, though, he had come to realize that this phrase lent itself to two markedly different conclusions: one was that never again should this happen to my people; the other that it should never again happen to any people. Between these two interpretations, I suggest nothing less than our common survival is at stake.

Internationally, there is one state that stands in defiance of practically every UN resolution that affects it: Israel. In the international community, Israel stands for the exercise of power with impunity. Israel defies the international community consistently - not because it is the world's sole superpower but because it is backed up by the world's sole superpower.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The laws of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars