A Quote by Pankaj Mishra

Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia, but we haven't really had, after the 1960s, a major oppositional culture in Western Europe and America. The Occupy movement was so startling and welcome partly because it was the first such eruption of mass protests in decades.
To create such people, such People's Representatives in Indonesia, would take decades, and they can only grow up in a fundamentally different political system, and in a totally new culture. What is now governing Indonesia is morally defunct, it is corrupt. What is ruling the country now is not even a culture or a political system: it is a disease.
'Rage' is the word that most often attaches itself to the Tea Party movement, and it's true that, from the outside looking in, their public demonstrations appear to be more enraged than any political events in America since the race riots and anti-war protests of the 1960s.
The largest source of greenhouse gases in the coming decades will not be the US, Western Europe and Japan, but the developing economies of East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The coming eruption of carbon emissions from the poor world will dwarf any reductions in the North.
Most historians accept that Egypt was a cradle of civilization, and that many cultural idioms and traditions come from there. What has yet to be understood, however, is the manner in which Egypt inherited its cultural elements from the lands of the North-West. This fact is not known today because of the threat it poses to Rome and London, the Vatican and Crown, and to all those who have profited from the suppression of knowledge.
The Occupy Wall Street protests at last suggest that America's wealth gap is once again becoming an organizing political principle in the country.
Colonialism is an idea born in the West that drives Western countries - like France, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain - to occupy countries outside of Europe.
Russia itself is a European country, and not just because our major political and economic centres are in Europe, but because Russian culture is primarily European culture.
When you look at history, every major movement, the first thing they do is create an aesthetic. Think about the Nazis. Or the Maoists in China. Any kind of revolution has an aesthetic, and that's because one of the fundamental human universals that everybody in every culture throughout time has done is wear clothes.
Many teachers of the Sixties generation said "We will steal your children", and they did. A significant part of America has converted to the ideas of the 1960s - hedonism, self-indulgence and consumerism. For half of all Americans today, the Woodstock culture of the Sixties is the culture they grew up with - their traditional culture. For them, Judeo-Christian culture is outside the mainstream now. The counter-culture has become the dominant culture, and the former culture a dissident culture - something that is far out, and 'extreme'.
When I went to Egypt right after 9/11 I was very upset. I used to live in Egypt. I had a lot of friends there. I spent two years teaching there. I had very fond feelings for that part of the world, and the fact that a culture I liked so much had attacked my own culture was really very upsetting to me.
In respect of Indonesia, I am determined to be the best possible friend of Indonesia that I can be, consistent with my overriding duty to protect our country. We would never do anything that was damaging to Indonesia, because we want Indonesia to flourish. We want Indonesia to take its rightful place as one of the really important countries of the world, as it will, sooner or later.
Across the country, universities that had abandoned in loco parentis in the 1960s because it was too oppressive and intrusive have replaced it with in loco Big Brother programs of political and cultural re-education.
Of course such a failed state as Indonesia is fully supported by Western academia and the mass media, because it does what it is told to do: it became a huge, brainwashed country, which is now plundering and exporting its riches, while not even having a clue that many parts of the world are now fighting for true independence from Western tyranny, and for socialism.
Today we are in a situation in which the free movement of people can have enormous, monumental dimensions, and I don't think that any country in Western Europe or in America can any longer adopt the idea of totally free movement of people. I t would simply overwhelm their social facilities, their societies and create migratory dynamics on the scales of tens and tens of millions of people. That simply is not practical.
My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.
For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
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