Mamdani Quotes

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.

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

The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western civilization: “the anti-Semitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized peoples.

Even the pages of the New York Times now include regular accounts distinguishing good from bad Muslims: good Muslims are modern, secular, and Westernized, but bad Muslims are doctrinal, antimodern, and virulent.

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.

Premodern peoples are said to have no creative ability and anti-modern fundamentalists are said to have a profound ability to be destructive. The destruction is taken as proof that they have no appreciation for human life, including their own.

Few would fail to notice the growing common ground between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the official response to it called “the war on terror.” Both sides deny the possibility of a middle ground, calling for a war to the finish. Both rally forces in the name of justice but understand justice as revenge. If the perpetrators of 9/11 refuse to distinguish between official America and the American people, target and victim, “the war on terror” has proceeded by dishing out collective punishment, with callous disregard for either “collateral damage” or legitimate grievances.

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.

And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.

The prerequisite to life is not power. The prerequisite to cohabitation, reconciliation, and a common political future is to give up the monopoly of power.

I have written this book with the conviction that the response to injury does not have to be vengeance and that we need to distinguish between revenge and justice. A response other than revenge is possible and desirable. For that to happen, however, we need to turn the moment of injury into a moment of freedom, of choice. For Americans, that means turning 9/11 into an opportunity to reflect on America's place in the world. Grief for victims should not obscure the fact that there is no choice without a debate and no democracy without choice.

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.

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.

In his Discourse on Colonialism (1951), Aimé Césaire wrote that a Hitler slumbers within “the very distinguished, very humanistic and very Christian bourgeois of the Twentieth century,” and yet the European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for “the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa.” “Not so long ago,” recalled Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), “Nazism turned the whole of Europe into a veritable colony.

Yet in Germany no less than the United States, the political meaning of genocide has never been widely understood. Both populations have, for the most part, denounced genocide as a racist act, but neither has recognized that it was also a productive one, whose outcome is the nation-states in which they live.

Edward Said summed up “the principal dogmas of Orientalism” in his majesterial study of the same name. The first dogma is that the same Orientalist histories that portray “the West” as “rational, developed, humane [and] superior,” caricature “the Orient” as “aberrant, undeveloped [and] inferior.” Another dogma is that “the Orient” lives according to set rules inscribed in sacred texts, not in response to the changing demands of life. The third dogma prescribes “that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and scientifically ‘objective.’ “And the final dogma is “that the Orient is at the bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).

So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.

If it is the struggle for power that explains the motivation of those who crafted the genocide, then it is the combined fear of a return to servitude and of reprisals thereafter that energized the foot soldiers of the genocide. The irony is that--whether in the Church, in hospitals, or in human rights groups, as in fields and homes--the perpetrators of the genocide saw themselves as the true victims of an ongoing political drama, victims of yesterday who may yet be victims again. That moral certainly explains the easy transition from yesterday's victims to killers the morning after.

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.

Hannah Arendt was right that genocide had to be linked to race ideology and bureaucratic efficiency if it was to be brought within the realm of comprehension. But she was mistaken in thinking that race was a singular South African, Boer, discovery. Had she added to the list of imperial horrors the genocide of the Amerindians and the centuries-long trans-Atlantic slave trade, she would have come to a different conclusion. For the nurturing ground of scientific racism was not as much the Boer experience in South Africa as the imperial encounter with continental Africa. The trans-Atlantic slave trade racialized notions of Africa. It fueled the conceptual tendency to divide Africa in two: that above the Sahara and that below it. From a bridge that had for centuries facilitated a regular flow of trading camel caravans between civilizations to its north and south, the Sahara was now seen as the opposite: a great civilizational barrier below which lay a land perpetually quarantined, “Negro Africa.” “True” Africa, “real” Africa, was now seen as identical with tropical (“sub-Saharan”) Africa geographically and Negro (“Bantu”) Africa socially.

Although the denazification process was widely reviled in Germany and beyond, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the logic of Nuremberg was revived in postcolonial contexts under the name of transitional justice, which repackages criminalization and victim’s justice in the language of human rights. The

When it came to federalism, however, there were different types. Regional (territorial) federalism has been the characteristic form in the West: the United States, Canada and so on. Ethnic federalism, in contrast, has been an African development following the Nigerian post-civil war constitution of the mid-1970s. It followed the logic of colonial indirect rule. As an expression of self-determination, ethnic federalism acknowledges the ethnic group—and not the population of a region—as the political self with the right to self-determination. The general principle is: for each ethnic group, a homeland. And inside each homeland, customary rights for members of the ethnic group indigenous to that homeland. In Ethiopia too, as had been in colonized Africa, those residing in the homeland but ancestrally not of it, were disenfranchised. This legal innovation turned ethnic difference into a source of advantage for those acknowledged in law as indigenous and discrimination against those who were not. The politicization of ethnicity created an enfranchised majority alongside disenfranchised minorities in each homeland. This is what C&S termed tribalism, the inevitable consequence of indirect rule.

Only the victor had the potential of transcending an earlier opposition between the two, by defining both as survivors of the civil war. To transcend the terms of the earlier opposition is to forge a new community of survivors of the civil war.

We may agree that genocidal violence cannot be understood as rational; yet, we need to understand it as thinkable.

Atrocity cannot be its own explanation. Violence cannot be allowed to speak for itself, for violence is not its own meaning. To be made thinkable it needs to be historicized.

So long as the customary sphere is not deethnicized as part of a broader reform, deracialization of the civic sphere will only lead to a spillover--even to an explosion--of ethnic conflict in the civic realm.

There can be no reconciliation without a reorganization of power.

The moral certainty about preventing another genocide imparts a moral justification to the pursuit of power with impunity.

Accounts of the genocide, whether academic or popular, suffer from three silences. The first concerns the history of genocide: many write as if genocide has no history and as if the Rwandan genocide had no precedent, even in this century replete with political violence. The Rwandan genocide thus appears as an anthropological oddity. For Africans, it turns into a Rwandan oddity; and for non-Africans, the aberration is Africa. For both, the temptation is to dismiss Rwanda as exceptional. The second silence concerns the agency of the genocide: academic writings, in particular, have highlighted the design from above in a one-sided manner. They hesitate to acknowledge, much less explain, the participation—even initiative—from below.5 When political analysis presents the genocide as exclusively a state project and ignores its subaltern and “popular” character, it tends to reduce the violence to a set of meaningless outbursts, ritualistic and bizarre, like some ancient primordial twitch come to life. The third silence concerns the geography of the genocide. Since the genocide happened within the boundaries of Rwanda, there is a widespread tendency to assume that it must also be an outcome of processes that unfolded within the same boundaries. A focus confined to Rwandan state boundaries inevitably translates into a silence about regional processes that fed the dynamic leading to the genocide.

The idea that the Tutsi were superior because they came from elsewhere, and that the difference between them and the local population was a racial difference, was an idea of colonial origin. It was an idea shared by rival colonists, Belgians, Germans, English, all of whom were convinced that wherever in Africa there was evidence of organized state life, there the ruling groups must have come from elsewhere.

And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it's how we stop the next one.

If tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party. And too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they've been left behind. We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great.

Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30.00 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20.00 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game anymore. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

Fun Fact: Albert Einstein, considered by many to be the smartest man ever, was a Democratic socialist like Bernie and Zohran Mamdani. Einstein agreed with Karl Marx, that capitalism is a corrupt system that brings out the worst in people and allows greedy robber barons to exploit the working class.

We’re now living in a timeline where a Muslim is protecting New York City against America's #1 enemy: The American president.

When I speak about making our city more affordable, my vision is not limited to the homes that we live in or the child care that we’re making universal — it’s also a vision where we make it possible for working people to afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.