Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Lecture at the Einstein Forum, May 15, 2025
Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world – the “darker peoples,” in W.E.B. Du Bois’s words – the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation – freedom from the white man’s world. The World after Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad re-evaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the darker people’s frequently thwarted vision of racial equality.
Lecture at the Einstein Forum, May 15, 2025
Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world – the “darker peoples,” in W.E.B. Du Bois’s words – the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation – freedom from the white man’s world. The World after Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad re-evaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the darker people’s frequently thwarted vision of racial equality.
