Nazi of Our Times -- A Decolonizing View
- Independent Ink
- Aug 23
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 31
Well, the upshot was that I had to tell them that I would not be able to do what I was expected to do by the ‘German public sphere’ -- that is, dance to the tune of the German and the Israeli states.
By Aditya Nigam
A personal note on the ‘Rotten-ness’ of the German 'public sphere':
Someone asked the other day whether the philosopher of rational-critical discourse and originator of the concept of 'public sphere' has yet broken his silence on the genocide in Gaza. Has he?
Last heard of, in November 2023, Jürgen Habermas had signed a letter in defense of the Rogue State's "right to defend itself".
Then there is another European philosopher luminary who once championed a 'Leftist Eurocentrism' -- and was convinced that if ever the world came to the brink of a nuclear WW III, it would be because of the 'Islamic lunatics'. Lo and behold!
Indeed, It was their darling, Bibi N, who actually did so. Have we heard a retraction from that position? I am not aware...
My story is linked to this circumstance. I was invited to deliver two keynote lectures in Germany (Berlin and another city) which were to be around an art exhibition on ‘Fascism and the Rise of the Global Right’. These lectures were to take place in the third week of October. I was asked to send an abstract, which I did on, ‘Thinking about the Fascism of Our Times -- A Decolonizing View’.
The key point in my abstract took off from Aime Cesaire's claim that before Europe became Nazism's victim, it was its accomplice in the colonies. My argument, which I shall hopefully place at length in due course, was to be that in this reading, fascism was not to be seen in terms of some "classical features" but as an assemblage, where political technologies developed in the colonies were fashioned into this apparently new entity. Here, references to settler colonialism, and its relation to the ongoing live-streamed settler colonial genocide of our times, were inescapable.
I wasn't expecting it to be smooth-sailing, so I was kind of prepared for what followed.
Over three rounds of online meetings, I was told that (a) my claim refuting the position of European scholars about the "uniqueness of the Holocaust" was unacceptable. And (b), my insistence on talking about the Genocide in Gaza, and that it was impossible to talk about fascism of the global Right today without substantially discussing Gaza/Palestine, was going to be problematic.
Actually, this had become very very critical as the days rolled by and all those who wasted no time in defending the Rogue State's "right to defend itself" were now refusing to even accept what was going on there.
I should clarify that the key organizers (three of them) were very sweet and wanted to make it happen and made every effort to do so. In fact, even the director of the organization, ‘someone from Africa’ (I am deliberately keeping things vague here because in my reckoning they are not responsible), was keen, but his very appointment has been under fire in the rotten German ‘public sphere’ because apparently "all these postcolonials are antisemitic"!
Some of you might remember the massive social media trolling of Achille Mbembe in 2020, accusing him of antisemitism because he had compared Israel with apartheid South Africa.
That was when the situation was very far from what we are currently witnessing in Gaza, but the viciousness was no less.
Well, the upshot was that I had to tell them that I would not be able to do what I was expected to do by the ‘German public sphere’ -- that is, dance to the tune of the German and the Israeli states.
Professor Aditya Nigam is a political theorist, formerly with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. Long associated with the Left movement, he has had an abiding interest in social and political movements and theoretical and philosophical questions related to social transformation. His recent work has been concerned with the decolonization of social and political theory. Nigam is one of the founder-members of the political blog, Kafila.online where he writes on contemporary issues.
He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011), Decolonizing Theory: Thinking Across Traditions (2020), Aasman aur Bhi Hain (in Hindi, Setu Prakashan, Delhi), Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism: Untimely Encounters (2023), Protyashar Ishtehar: Degrowth o Poonjibader Porer Jeebon (in Bengali, Gronthik, Dhaka, forthcoming).