The Monsters are Here

Works Discussed:

Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization

Siddhartha Deb, Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India

Over 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, were slaughtered in the 2002 riots that swept through the western Indian state of Gujarat. As detailed by Richard Seymour in Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, mobs of Hindus swarmed Muslim neighborhoods in Ahmedabad, setting fire to homes, throwing acid on women’s faces. “Children were force-fed patrol and set on fire,” Seymour writes (126). Policemen stood by and watched, the situation reminiscent of Jim Crow, when it was white southerners looting and burning to ash entire black neighborhoods, with the sheriffs puffing on cigarettes while peoples’ worlds were erased in a matter of moments, leaving behind human and political debris.

When the riots did occur in Gujarat, they occurred under the administration of Narendra Modi, one of the Hindu right’s most cunning soldiers in a war for the so-called preservation of Hindu civilization. Elements of the international community had condemned Modi, rightly connecting the mobs to him and his party’s active encouragement of their most fascist desires of eliminating the Other. It was Modi and his team of sycophants who connected what was an accidental fire that consumed Hindu pilgrims on a train to it being an intentional act of anti-Hindu violence perpetrated by a lawless and ungrateful Muslim minority. However, the anxieties swirling around such criminal acts quickly turned to vapor, as India became an essential global “partner” for the U.S. in Asia, and in the developing world, just as China was in global ascension.[i] After riding the wave of anti-Muslim bigotry to secure the position as India’s next Prime Minister, Modi would find himself wined and dined in Obama’s White House, the same man whose supporters label the India mainstream press as traitors, whose supporters had silenced generations of Muslims over several days of politically motivated mayhem.

Siddhartha Deb, journalist and author, had attended one of the very first rallies Modi held in the U.S., at Madison Square Garden in early 2016. Not only had Obama penned a glowing tribute to Modi in Time, a cross-section of U.S. political and economic elites was in attendance, eager to speak highly of a man who was making India “great again.” In his collection of essays detailing India’s descent into Hindu fanaticism over a decade, Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India, Deb writes about the lurid event, “There was a revolving stage, a speed portrait painter, and a bipartisan coterie of American politicians, including senators Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez, and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley who is of Indian descent” (14-15).

Since Modi’s political rise, there has been a coterie of hard-right leaders emerging in the world, those who are forcing existing institutions to contend with their explicit egregiousness, and to even learn to placate. This includes Trump, of course, but also, Orban in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, and Netanyahu in the settler colonial state known as Greater Israel. Both Twilight Prisoners and Disaster Nationalism, apart from reminding us of the gory details of their rise and the complicity of the liberal bourgeois order to their brutality, offer us sober analysis of the political agendas and machinations that such movements and faces exemplify and drag into what’s considered the “mainstream”, like a US marine carrying a corpse into the middle of an American airbase. Both Deb and Seymour follow in the intellectual tradition that to defeat the enemy, one must be able to understand them, to peer through the overwhelming chaos such forces indulge in.

Broader than Deb, whose analysis solely focuses on Modi’s India and the various constituencies the BJP has allowed to fester, Seymour tackles the connections between Modi, Trump, Orban, Duterte, among others who’ve been so swift in their division the world into “patriots” and the deceiving Other. Typical of his style, as a political theorist who’s grappled with such heady topics like climate doomerism and the persistence of austerity politics despite NOT providing the financial stability it so claims, Seymour is not one who easily throws down sloganeering in lieu of analysis.[ii] For instance, Seymour rightly says from the beginning that the issue with what he deems as “disaster nationalism”, the nationalism of Trump and Modi among others, is not necessarily because they’re full of “resentment” or that they motivate people against the status quo. Resentment, not to mention anger, are critical components of the left as well, or should be. We do believe in an “us” and them, that of the capitalists and their minions versus the rest of us trying desperately to rid the world of oppression and its stink. How can one not be soaked with anger when enduring a life under capitalist and U.S. hegemony? Not to be angry, indeed, is more alarming to witness in someone staring into the political abyss, surrounded by the mass slaughter of people in Gaza to the waters rising each and every day. “It is a coherent and moral way of thinking and of acting on the world,” Seymour explains, although astutely adding that when it is not channeled in a more meaningful way of creation, it can lend itself to being a simply a force of destruction and violence against those without any real power, an Other that such figures, like a Trump, learn to demonize, whether that’s Haitian migrants, or people who are trans and just trying to lead their lives in dignity (29).

A critical ingredient of said “disaster nationalism”, according to Seymour, is its insistence on funneling people’s rage into unadulterated spite. Some of it still is directed at the political and some portion of the economic elite, but for their supposed allegiance to helping marginalized peoples that are deemed as “undeserving”. It’s a retread of Reagan’s dog-whistle tactics of suggesting that welfare is being taken advantage of people in the “inner cities”, except with far more vitriol behind it, a willingness for it to be unleashed beyond the bounds of purely electoral politics, as demonstrated by the riots in Gujarat as well as the far-right protests in Charlottesville.

Disaster nationalism “offers the balm of vengeance, the promise of self-love and the cure of restoring society to a promise of national self-love and the cure of restoring society to a more pristine, harmoniously hierarchical state through condign violence” (42).

Some of this is revealed too in Deb’s own pursuit of why India, once known for being secular and nominally socialist-aligned, has become such a hotbed of craven Hindu right mythology and rising anti-Muslim anti-modernity sentiment, among segments of the “people” to cable-news shows pumping such poison into audience’s ears and brains. Although Deb does not use the phrase “disaster nationalism”, and most of his writing is less through political theory and more so reliant on-the-ground journalist work of interviewing people on all sides of the political divide in India, he clearly sees a similar issue of how at the core of Hindutva is spite and rage, not at India’s elite, but at India’s elite for elevating the “undesirables”, particularly Muslim Indians.

“They should have their voting rights and any state benefits taken away,” a BJP activist confides to Deb, a fascist heart lurking beneath an office dress shirt and a soft voice (136). One is reminded, through Deb’s reporting and something that Seymour does touch upon in his own assessment, that hard-right supporters can still be “normal” people, all the while very much capable of doing and believing horrible and deadly beliefs. Beliefs that such people do want to project onto the “undesirable,” to kill and maim us. This brings to mind the incidents of the “normal” person here in the U.S., who can go from being someone’s friend to killing that same person, hopped up on ideas of white supremacy and us, the brown Other, supposedly ready to exact “revenge” on them. It’s a psychosis cultivated by the rightwing.

This compulsion to whip up such anger and vitriol is rooted to the reality that in fact, for most disaster nationalist or hard-right leaders, there’s not much, politically speaking, they truly offer in terms of an alternative. For Orban, aside from some policies directed at keeping Hungarian nuclear Christian families “together”, his policies are as neoliberal as anyone in the Hungarian establishment prior to his takeover of the country’s mainstream. With the fall of the Berlin Wall itself, much of Eastern Europe has swiftly transformed into breeding ground for rightwing nationalists, very eager to spout hate speech on the front steps of their parliaments, at the same time, shaking hands with foreign investors day-in and day-out.[iii]

Trump’s politics are increasingly paper-thin on the issue of labor, as he promotes himself as the “working man’s” voice, all the while currying favor with economic elites like Elon Musk, a rabid anti-union loon.[iv] During his first and hopefully, only stint as the nation’s Grand Wizard in the White House, the Trump administration was very much against such basic things as lifting the federal minimum wage and appointing anti-union officials to the National Relations Labor Board.[v]

“What disaster nationalism offers, instead of transcendence, is muscular national capitalism,” Seymour clarifies for us, “It promises, as Donald Trump suggests, to make capitalism ‘work’, but in a way that is very different way to what we’ve been accustomed to” (47).

What this does is certainly the creation of a rabid and dedicated base of supporters, some of whom are blue-collar and uneducated. But the base of support for Trump, given his own antipathy towards labor and basic political freedoms and rights, is oftentimes precarious and as thin skinned as him and his contemporaries, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, whose own rightwing base of support can run quickly run dry, revealing the most diluted left behind. It’s fair to remember that Bolsonaro himself was trailing significantly social democrat Lula de Silva in the 2018 elections, before trumped-up charges of “corruption”, a mercurial accusation, took Lula out of the political equation.[vi]

“In most cases, excepting India, a major weakness for the new far right is that its projection of political influence far exceeds its real social depth,” Seymour explains (200).

But even in the case of India, there are political parties on the left, especially the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), that still reigns over crucial parts of the country, like Kerala.[vii] There are a multitude of trade unions, and lately, activists very much confronting directly the power and influence of the BJP. When ruminating on the success of the hard right, one must remember that it has more to do with their movement’s willingness to wield power rather than anything to do with rampant popularity. Even in the context of India, the issue of rightwing power is certainly more of a broader level of support than one would find in the U.S. or Brazil for the rightwing, but it is very much related to their takeover of basic institutions and political infrastructure at the expense of the left-wing. This is demonstrated in the arrest of a group of left-wing activists known as the BK16, which includes those in their late eighties, taken away in handcuffs. Though there is evidence that incriminating information “discovered” on the laptops of such activists, linking them with a supposed plot to harm Modi, was “planted” there, not much has changed in terms of how such activists are being treated, and of how others are still being rounded up, and disappeared.

“Neither the Pegasus findings nor the global outcry after Swamy’s death has done anything to change the intimidation, surveillance, and fear of entrapment experienced by the BK16 or their supporters,” Debs highlights (188).

One could trace such conclusions to another important lesson for the left, one rooted in the singular recognition of the usefulness of state power and of the need to actively seize such power. “When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror” is apt here.[viii]

Disaster nationalism is, ultimately, a product of classic liberal bourgeois pretensions, as much as it represents a far more horrific version of what many people have already been enduring under forms of capitalism, settler colonialist politics, and white supremacy. It was Reagan who expanded the so-called war on drugs, more so a war on the poor, which allowed police to wield battering rams to knock down peoples’ doors in mainly blue-collar and lower-income black and brown neighborhoods.[ix] It was Reagan too whose administration supported some of the most heinous forces on the planet, such as the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua known for their terroristic methods against most of the people simply wanting to overthrow decades of a one-family dynasty supported and backed by U.S. imperial might.[x]

One of the clearest examples of this is Israel, the apartheid state doubling as the U.S. colonial outpost in the Middle East. In his chapter titled “Genocide,” Seymour focuses mainly on the ways in which the existing Israel war on the Palestinian people, which some reports estimate close to 186,000 Palestinians having been killed, is both a continuation of previous contradictions within Israeli society, and of course, its escalation.[xi] “The Zionist movement, from its inception, embodied a mass of contradictions,” Seymour details, “A movement seeking a ‘land without a people for a people without a land,’ though ever land it considered was already copiously peopled” (169). Labour governments inside Israel were less explicitly violent as compared to Likud now, a party whose officials have no shame in their public disgust of Palestinian life. Still, every Israeli administration was predicated on taking land from the Palestinians. Every administration relied on more and more extremist “settlers” to patrol its formal borders against the Palestinians. Very much like the GOP and the rightwing elements of the Democrat party cultivating the constituency that would later on prop up Trump and other extremist weirdos, the Israeli establishment paved the way for Netanyahu and his ilk to find a support base eager for the extermination of the Palestinian state.

Unlike most liberal scholars who would suggest that somehow, Trump is “un-american” or unique, and the same with Orban, or Netanyahu, Seymour identifies how the past and present collide and melt together. Even the recent attacks on trans people, and identifying them as an internal enemy, reflect standard U.S. politics. Trump is an American as its genocide against indigenous peoples, and its obsession over dropping bombs on populous cities. Seymour writes, “During the Cold War, communism was thought indistinguishable from subversive sexuality. ‘If you want to be against McCarthy, boys,’ said Senator Joseph McCarthy, ‘you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker’” (95). As another scholar, Charisse Burden-Stelly has said, the religion of America, especially white people, is “anti-communism”, which carries over decade after decade, unless challenged by the left.[xii]

Prior to the brutal Gujarat riots, there was the 1984 anti-Sikh mass killings perpetrated across India, which led to thousands of Sikh Indians being murdered by Hindus.[xiii] This was done under a Congress-led administration, not the BJP.

There are portions of Twilight Prisoners and Disaster Nationalism that could have been strengthened. In the case of Deb’s work, it would’ve been beneficial to have included essays or have written a new one that spoke on collective resistance against the BJP. Some of this is mentioned, and of course, the emphasis here is on detailing the rise of the rightwing and the complicity of the Indian social order. But there is a general void here. The very last essay included in this collection was Deb’s conversation with Arundhati Roy, which is valuable in its own right, but once more frames this struggle as mainly an intellectual one of brave individuals speaking truth to power. A solution here is the organization of everyone targeted by the BJP, pulled together by a left-wing front.

Seymour does relay some conversation of what could or should be done to confront this rising rightwing threat globally, and his response is far more holistic and realistic than simply someone arguing that all we need is a social democratic spirit. Seymour himself notes that in some instances, those who’ve given their souls to the rightwing, usually whites in America, usually more middle class, are not necessarily searching for a real alternative. They desire their right to dominate and feel secure as they once were, or felt they were, willing to carry on their solemn duty to surveil and police the rest of us. To appeal to such groups would necessitate conceding critical social democratic demands since such demands can be tied to our successes, and white resentment is a force to be reckoned with in this regard, able to twist what are obvious connections of lifting all boats to sources of panic and paranoia over us “taking over”. But, Seymour does raise the importance of social movements creating an ecosystem in which working people can fight for their most immediate needs, like a wage increase, but also, gain from such movements a sense of community and wellness, and humanity. “But if workers are drawn into struggle by a combination of need and hope, pulled into the rhythms and contradictions of the historical process with its volatile upturns and downtowns, conceive of themselves as part of that history and form the radical need for community and universality, then they are to that extent inoculated against the paranoid, anti-social and vengeful passions of disaster nationalism,” he states (205). This too would indeed benefit those of us who haven’t yet become fodder for the far-right, but who feel alienated, understandably, from a mainstream political system that perpetuates colonialist and capitalist exploitation and harm.

However, there could’ve been more historical examples incorporated into the final chapter, to truly exemplify what it is Seymour is referring to. We have a faint idea of this as he does mention labor unions broadly having successfully, in the past, created not just campaigns for struggles on critical issues, but an ecosystem of caring and community. But more specific examples could’ve been helpful here, considering the level of detail we do read about the heinous elements of the far-right, past and present.

Nonetheless, one comes away with a far more astute view of the forces arrayed against us when reviewing the work of Seymour and Deb. Some of it is very frustrating and horrifying to read. But the rightwing and the forces of oppression are not going away any time soon, and it’s pertinent to us to learn how they crawl and move if we have any chance of defeating them and tossing them into the pit. Seymour and Debs help elucidate, to some degree, how we should do that, and what to expect moving forward. The overwhelming nature of a world gradually dominated by the excesses of liberal bourgeois politics is assessed and contained with very real lessons for us to carry ahead.

The monsters are here, have been lurking for decades. It’s about time we see them for what they are.

Notes

[i] Kaush Arha and Samir Saran, “The US needs a new paradigm for India: ‘Great Power Partnership’”, Atlantic Council, April 1, 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-us-needs-a-new-paradigm-for-india-great-power-partnership/

[ii] Timothy Snyder. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Crown).

[iii] “Europe and right-wing nationalism: A country-by-country guide,” BBC News, Nov. 13, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006

[iv] Jacob Gallagher, “Elon Musk’s Giant Leap,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/style/elon-musk-donald-trump-campaign-rally.html

[v] Celine McNicholas, Margaret Poydock, and Lynn Rhinehart, “Unprecedented: The Trump NLRB’s attack on workers’ rights,” Economic Policy Institute, Oct. 16, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/unprecedented-the-trump-nlrbs-attack-on-workers-rights/

[vi] Shasta Darlington and Taylor Barnes, “Brazil’s former President Lula released from prison,” CNN, Nov. 8, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/08/americas/brazil-lula-da-silva-released-prison-intl/index.html

[vii] Ashique Ali T & Angshuman Sarma, “Kerala’s Communists Are Showing India a Path Out of Poverty,” Jacobin, Nov. 1, 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/11/kerala-india-communist-party-farmers-cooperatives-bds-wayanad

[viii] “Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,” Marxist archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/05/19c.htm

[ix] Andrew Glass, “Reagan declares ‘War on Drugs,’ October 14, 1982,” Politico, Oct. 14, 2010, https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/reagan-declares-war-on-drugs-october-14-1982-043552

[x] “President Reagan gives CIA authority to establish the Contras,” History, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reagan-gives-cia-authority-to-establish-the-contras

[xi] Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee & Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential,” The Lancet, July, 10, 2024, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext

[xii] Charisse Burden-Stelly. 2023. Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

[xiii] “India: Prosecute Those Responsible for 1984 Massacre of Sikhs,” Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/11/02/india-prosecute-those-responsible-1984-massacre-sikhs?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw9p24BhB_EiwA8ID5BrGcSHtcNWWoXlbgzJJXkqiaUBr9akpBxSKvlC8XIn_MIukusSOTGhoCDvkQAvD_BwE