A dedicated anticommunist, the americans were vulnerable to phrases such as the numerology of western civilizations. People see that peculiar capital of liberalism , a dogma which was intended to guarantee economic became the ideology of corporate structures of capitalism. Used by them to prevent a proper politicalcontrol of their power. It was also alert to the fundamental screen that went inside capitalism and liberal democracy that gradually gathered around the world and every society chose ultimately just as britain and theUnited States did. Of course we would not have participated at the blind fanatics who made the cold war so treacherous without offending historycenter stage , and freemarket localizers had grown more complex and charitable and help unravel large parts of asia, africa and western america to foster chaos in their ownsocieties. Thank you for reading from. Another way to talk about blind fanatics and the book publishes a range of people who might fit thatdescription. Can you give us a sense of what leadership it is that youre talking about here . I think when ronald need more rights published this particular excerpt in the late 50s he was also responding to people who were at that point. And the idea that communists have to be used to threaten american achievements includingdemocracy and capitalism. And he was very much questioning the notion, highly contingent achievements that the United States could be spread in different parts ofthe world. The phrase is actually quite useful to describe a very broad tendency. Think about how the scholarship in the earliest part of the 20th century of british historians assuming that the world is going to converge on the modern supply by britain and to lesser extent theUnited States. Of course, this also becomes much much stronger when there is absolutely no ideological opposition whatsoever. And theres a kind of madness in the air people assuming that now they have this opportunity to completely remake the world in all kinds of numerous notions of the newworld order. And the flat world, and on close examination theres these notions but they become the default victim of the 90s and 2000 until the financial crisis. The 1950s arrived not so glam anymore. I think in that sense that can be qualified a little bit. Theyre really truly become fanatics of a pretty balanced sort. Think about the iraq war as the kind of blood he chaos, it creates large parts of asia and africa so were looking at very dangerous fanatics in thatcontext. I think people who follow the category would be someone like david guitar, people seem to be within, their expressing ideas in many ways but posting that its still trying to be civil and to be accepted in that culture whereas your third essay in this book really expresses someshocking ideas very bluntly. I was amazed going back to reading that piece that he would say some of the things he said. It was very interesting, this is a review for the time in many of these areas but these ideas like his which you now find correctly so offensive were widelyaccepted. They asked them to make a documentary also showing the unitedstates. He was writing for the Financial Times, the new york review of books and practically every prestigious area of america and there to simply no challenge whatsoever coming to him from liberals writing articles. There were obviously academics who were saying what is this nonsense about British Empire being this benign benediction. But whats really interesting about this is just how so many of these individuals you mentioned work speaking but theres an atmosphere and a sort of this particular anglicized group constituted by people who are ivy league or that have made their victory through washington dc , london, new york think tanks, various publications or articles who really in a way seem to have kind of created a consensus. So even if theyre not speaking the language they assume that the world was going to be read and david gallant is an interesting figure in the Financial Times that became essentially. [inaudible] and they stopped competing altogether which were going to sue the far right and starting with the speechwriter, again staying within the center but actually protecting it from all kinds of Political Tendencies so meanwhile its in its most fundamental state refers people across that anglican American Group who are not at a basis for aggression as someone like this but nevertheless exercises a great legal authority. Is for a group of people who do not present themselves asradicals , even though many of the competitions they put forward are quite strange in some cases, they always i think its said they identify as liberals and i wonder what to clarify, what form youre taking a mat here because it can take many forms. You talk about liberalism that keeps us unrelated markets, is that kind of the summation of what were talking about in this incarnation . Certainly the incarnation of liberalism is neoliberalism that various societies have suffered from in the last two, three decades but i think from a historical view if you look at the economies which i write about in bland fanatics, talking starting off with capitalism and free trade, but always with this huge military power behind these ideals, so that is one particular situation that i was interested in and thats something i look to again and again in the book because this is something that is actually working in alliance with a tremendous military and political and diplomatic power and then of course you know its not an accident that the economist comes a great cheerleader of american liberalism and find a new career for itself in the 1980s and in many ways it becomes an american headquarters. So i think in that sense the book that i was reviewing is medicating in a way that the magazines often are used to, at some point they start to talk about how we need to have a social system and whats really interesting is how liberalism comes this elite everywhere. And this is something that the elites want because it certainly advances their interests but its also something that allows them to be progressive. And essentially in tune with it. So even as the extreme far right aims at these results like the overthrow which they exported of the iraq war which the economist also supported by liberalism becomes essentially. [inaudible] theres a modern prestige of liberalism that is joined with aplomb and of course you have this very conscious to create this Prestigious International dialogue, where the relevant people are recruited, like john locke and john hobbs and various people that italk about. So this is something i want to say you have people claiming to represent liberalism or claiming to advance liberal ideas make alliances with all kinds of different political movements , individuals, organizations and tendencies. Part of your book i think youre editing is about the lofty ideals and the rhetoric and then the mismatch to those ideals and the reality of those people, can you talk about that and what you think are the intent of liberalism . I think i should say and i say this in the introduction that what really in many ways is unnerving was an indian experience, and experience of indian reality especially, there isnt a very strong liberal tendency in india but what exists seems to be secular and at the same time its very deeply allied and connected to the ordered establishment, which has absolutely no time for secularism or the oldfashioned kind of liberalism but in the past, when liberal particularly in india were closely connected to religious power and they had this vision of kashmir for instance which as many of you know is disputed territory, right from the beginning but there very much about india and happy progressive notions that we are advancing democracy, all the things you can think about and i assumed they were right and i internalized those notions so then i realized that secularism and that civilization actually, there is a military occupation going on in the cashmere. So that was really my education was a sort of shocking disconnect between very highflown, highminded rhetoric about superior morality and a superior set of ideas and then when you see itworking on the ground , you see violence, suffering, despair and this is been the experience of many peopleover the last few decades. The solace of prosperity, Economic Growth and also meritocracy. And whatever realities that this kind of rhetoricand this promise. So i think for that reason theres this huge reservoir of disaffection and a kind of backlash, a kind of violent backlash against anyone who calls themselves or can be plausibly defined as a liberal because the world has become so tainted with a certain kind of compromise, a certain kind of hypocrisy that im reminded of actually leave mortimer who is a very famous interview at the times in the 19th century where she said please dont call me liberal, its a dirty word in africa and at actually south african radical group. Liberals are too complicit in the regime there so this is not something i want to use for myself. And for many people, but word has become so tainted and it contains for them a set of ideals that we should highly advanced and that we should try to realize, that other liberals are the rightway to advance those ideals. Looking at excavating that history again, i think because the view of liberalism is that this is securing individual rights and that is available to everyone, and yet a recurring theme in these essays is that through hundreds of years liberalism has been tied up with hierarchy and materialism and violence and its a system that may be is inexperienced in the colonizing countries now in the last several years but its the experience overwhelmingly of most people for a long time. So you talk in the book about the processes we are observing now as essentially interior liberalism coming home but what do you mean by that phrase . What are the processes or the problems with cominghome . I think we need to be much more aware of these problems if we are able to diagnose them earlier than we had started to. The reason that we did not embark on this in different ways, even from the more lets say sensible right, is because liberalism during the cold war became this entrenched ideology. I remember the book reviews written by the times. [inaudible] which is kind of a unified theme that ties all these Different Things together but what im really critiquing is a kind of cold war liberalism that became dominant in mainstream journalism and definitely in mainstream academia claiming that its a sort of intellectual tradition back in the 1950s and obviously in contrast to communism and then of course having defeated fascism liberalism looked like the best game in town and even today people would say if you do away with liberalism what are you going to mess with but those were the rules back then that you either had this version of liberalism or you had terrorism all the time like stalin and the soviet union and mouse a song, really hiding these higher bouts of liberalism is a complicated history and ways in which liberal practices were compromised by association with judaism from the 1950s onward so the idea that liberalism has become a workable ideology for a United States that more and more people are becoming aware of the right, they have a civilized momentstarting in the 1950s and 60s. Theres something deeply delusional about thosenotions. When you think of someone back in the 50s like john roll even in the 60s, he argued a lot liberalliberty and justice. Where are the nonright people in that division, where are the africanamericans, where are the countries that are beginning to fight, not to fight for but achieve these sovereignty and independence. So what were trying to say is that liberalism which weve entrenched in which has been banging the drum for in different platforms was an error and intellectually capable of acknowledging these new realities that emerge right after the end of the Second World War with colonization, with the civilized movement, with so many different surroundings. Its made by cold war liberalism and not to mention the fact that inequality starts to become aproblem from the 1970s onward. And now of course we have various cause various demagogues to emerge but what were pointing to is a deep bureaucracy of this framework that weve been carrying a long time that developed to the communist threats from cold war and basically at this point doesnt seem to give us any answer except to say after me, the deluge. And that was always the alternative that was being offered during the cold war. Trying to get to the link between some of the politicians in liberalism and the way theyve been enabled by empire. It seems and correct me if im wrong but you seem to be saying in the First World War that the ability western europeanshave to acquire , to go in several countries and colonize other countries essentially enables that and enables liberalism to foster in their home countries until the First World War and that link, that the original link between liberalism and empire. It is actually not something i can claim for myself. This is something anticolonial capitalists aptly pointed out from the earlier 20th century on but even before the First World War there was a fear that individual liberty of the kind available to at least some people in england at that point, even that was a common threat. It was either in the 1920s that all these rights that are available to many people, all these democratic rights would be in danger once asia becomes free and becomes a rifle and competitor to these economies because as long as they can exploit these nations, as long as they dominateand subjugate these countries , those little liberties that theyre able to secure a small part of their population would be in danger. Thats why i think of different economic not models, we need to think of a different way of viewing the world, not just becoming politically respectful of the environment. Thats part of the economic critique is these models that have made you prosperous have made you somewhat democratic are not sustainable and you can see it because we can see the violence that it inflicts on different parts of the world. And that at some point will come home when you can no longer expect those societies in thesame way youre doing right now. Thing im trying to understand and clarify why liberalism leads to the exploitation, is the idea that you have a society where everyone is free to compete with each other, is it going to work out for some people that it was a kind of escape valve . How does that work . That why should liberalism lead to. Why should it lead someone that needs to be exploited because i think that those people who are proponents of liberalism or would like to make arguments in defense of the system would not automatically assume that liberalism means someones going to be exploited. What the mechanism there . Its silly because liberalism works within the framework of a capitalist economy which is centered on exploitation and of course in the 19th century it was also in a way Carry Forward by expansion, offering markets in the world and the people bombarding them, sending in economies open up their markets so liberalism this idea of expansion or Economic Growth, freedom , these are fundamentally from the beginning in practice when they started to be drawn into practice. They were always connected with this capitalist economy which was benefiting, which was flourishing and advancing because it was based on exploitation in the first instance and even after the establishment of a state degree, different forms of false labor. Not to mention largescale disposition so it took an experienced form could argue that theres a moment where if you really think it was an intellectual role of liberalism, but even there and you would find that actually yes, there would be sacred in the country so its a very hard mentality something that we try to argue in this book. The history of liberalism and imperialism and slaveryand thats what makes it so problematic. And its peculiarly unsuited for our democratic age. We are getting into a democratic revolution but the problems that so many are probably not aware, from elite that has seen provisions of power long time and find to share those privileges with more people. That is a point i think people like gandhi were making back in early 20th century, that this would become more and more visible, the fact that youre in economy, political structure, political system is based upon violence and exploitation and that right now it clear to us in the colonies that at some point people themselves in your own countries more and more of them are going to realize this is what the whole system is about. This is why anyways i feel like we did great damage to ourselves but not listening to that particular tradition, the anticolonialism thought which began in that concentric. So much of what i said draws from the fact that i write in periodicals were sometimes you cant even mention certain people because when you find the proper footnote for them, theres infrastructure, the way the industry works, yet systems of knowledge, systems in certn ways of citing people and putting together scholarly editions, and so much of the stuff is just out there. Its not being put together in the way scholarship works in britain and america. At the same time theres a lot of resistance to including that stuff, because why do we need that . We are doing fine right now with cold war liberalism and various, variations of which. Its funny the story you told about the realization you have when youre looking at the situation in kashmir with the echoes the comet that you quote where he still basically the same thing that you realize when hes talking to people use liberalism is a rich people, we dont want anything to do with the. Thats in the 1960s. One thing to talk about in this book is there are several events that uses basically delaying this reckoning. One is the idea that we reach the end of history but then when it becomes clear that actual things are not working out, the way we thought they were wood isnt so great. You have 9 11 and the election of obama. It seems almost any event could be used to justify delaying the reckoning with what isnt working. And i think if you have this massive intersexual industries that grew up during the cold war, that something i keep saying we need updated the kind of books that were written, some of them in the 60s and 70s, just how and intelligence devoted to advancing certain american ideas. Being in america as a former inn the 50s and 60s observed this very closely. Some of the anticommunist expatriates and exiles from europe when the came to america really shocked to see this industry slow