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Selv har Ingemar gått i rutete flanellskjorter siden 1970, han har aldri tenkt over hva slike skjorter signaliserer, men det finnes en enighet i verden når det gjelder slike skjorter: De utstråler noe som har med mann å gjøre, jordnær, praktisk, mann som har øks og sag, mann som kan legge seg under kjøkkenvasken og fikse en pakning, mann som setter seg under et tre med kaffe på kanne, mann og skog, mann og natur, mann som har kontroll på strålen når han pisser.

— Folk som hater lokalhistorie by Tyra Teodora Tronstad (Page 150)

Jeg lurer på hvorfor alle som er opptatt av lokalhistorie enten er lærere eller gamle, og hvorfor de blir mer og mer opptatt av lokalhistorie jo eldre de blir. Faren min er 55 år gammel nå, og hvem vet hvordan han blir når han blir nitti.

— Folk som hater lokalhistorie by Tyra Teodora Tronstad (Page 170)

The world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law is now receding fast. Today, the US fence along its Mexican border, the Australian practice of imprisoning asylum seekers on offshore islands, the German promise of mass deportations, the open incitement by a British home secretary of far-right English nationalists, and the growing obsession of many young men with ‘white genocide’, ‘the Great Replacement’ and other end-time scenarios of the early twenty-first century, make cruelly visible the homecoming of white supremacism at the heart of the modern West.

Its fierce fortress mentalities were inflamed on 7 October 2023, when Hamas destroyed, permanently, Israel’s aura of invulnerability. The surprise assault by people presumed to have been crushed represents, after 9/11, the twenty-first century’s second Pearl Harbor to many shocked and horrified white majoritarians. And, as before, the perception among them that white power has been publicly violated has ‘triggered’, in John Dower’s words, ‘a rage bordering on the genocidal’.

— The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra, Mikhail Sen (Narrator)

Nevertheless, for most people , decolonisation, fusing history with promise, remains a captivating story about the past, present and future, in which they seek to recognise themselves. For decades, white Westerners claimed to have made the modern world – as seen in the titles of many popular non-fiction books in Anglo-America – with their political, intellectual and technological breakthroughs, and ideological and military predominance. Today, many more people have come to see themselves in an equally compelling narrative of decolonisation – one in which white men subjugated and disparaged much of the world’s population and must now surrender their cruel prerogatives.

Many in Western political, corporate and media classes hope to quell this deep and broad consensus by suppressing scholarly examinations of racism and imperialism, whining about wokeness and cancel culture, or, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s mobilisation against black and brown legislators, desperately throwing money at explicitly racial causes. But the narrative of decolonisation gains more emotional appeal especially as resurgent white nationalists in the West robustly try to repaint the colour line, and Zionism becomes more militantly exclusionary than before.

As mobs mouthing the xenophobic slogans of mainstream politicians rampage through the streets of the US, UK and Germany, and Muslims protesting the Western-assisted slaughter in Gaza are denounced as traitors, the old affinities between the West’s war-making abroad and race-making at home become too garishly apparent. Arguably, condemnation of Western powers has not been so widespread since the mid-twentieth century when most leaders of ‘darker nations’ were either fighting for national self-determination or incorporating their anti-colonial triumphs into the pedagogical systems of new nation states. The globally resonant accusation of genocide against Israel by the heirs of Nelson Mandela attests to the spread of a mass, outrage-inflected awareness of the linked fates of the wretched of the earth. This awareness has detached itself from the boundaries of nation states and existing frameworks of sovereignty, territoriality and national patriotism.

— The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra, Mikhail Sen (Narrator)

In [American opinion makers'] master narrative, increasingly threadbare after Donald Trump’s twin victories but still being recycled by anti-communist historians such as Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum, Western democracies were/are permanently ranged against totalitarian or authoritarian enemies.

This discourse ably served the Cold War’s political purposes and propaganda needs, but it also made for self-deception. Fixated with the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the miserable realities of Soviet and Chinese communism, many American intellectuals became prone to believe too much in their own idea of the free world as a custodian of liberalism and democracy, heir to the Enlightenment and nemesis of totalitarianism. Oblivious to the long centuries of genocidal violence and dispossession that made Europe and the United States uniquely powerful and wealthy, they could not see the future, either: that the world to come would be shaped by ideas and movements occurring among the vast majority of the world’s population, in countries geographically remote from, and historically hostile to, the West; that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 would hold greater consequences for the wider world than the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Mao Zedong’s declaration that ‘the Chinese people have stood up’ after a century of humiliation by Western countries was more than just boosterish rhetoric.

— The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra, Mikhail Sen (Narrator)

Locke read “Josephus de Acosta” closely. He agreed with the Jesuit’s “great conjecture” that large parts of the New World were pristine, inhabited not by the storied Aztecs or the cultured Inka but by artless peoples whose simplicity offered a window back in time to what Europe was like before written records and political society. In the beginning, all was America. Not Tenochtitlán or Cuzco, those wondrous cities that bewitched Cortés and Pizarro. Not what Tenochtitlán became—the densely populated Mexico City, the great metropolis of the Catholic Spanish Empire. But America, empty and unclaimed.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

What set Acosta apart from other Conquest chroniclers was that he didn’t posit an either-or, this-or-that opposition between savagery and civilization. Rather, the traveling Jesuit offered a secular evolutionary account of the transition between primitive and complex societies. He identified human history as passing through definable stages. First: simple societies which mostly hunt and gather, and which have neither leader nor religion. Second: close-to-the-land settled communities that were governed loosely by elders. Third: a kingdom or empire that exercises dominion and is organized around a clear political hierarchy and religion. According to Acosta, America was home to all three. Societies like the Inka and Aztecs had reached the highest levels of civilization. Other societies were perhaps moving toward more complexity but their mode of life still fell within one of the first two stages.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Hugo Grotius, who was born in the western Netherlands and wrote in the early 1600s, appreciated Vitoria but complained of the absolutism of his followers, of “Molina and others,” and the obstacles they placed in the way of waging war. He disputed Molina’s argument that violations of natural law could only be punished by local civil authorities. In other words, under Molina’s rule, no European power could legitimately wage war under the pretext of protecting Native Americans from their own rulers or from other Native Americans. Grotius, in contrast, said that not only did European empires have the right to punish violations of natural law, but so could private-trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company. Grotius here was defending Dutch imperialism in Asia. Heralded as the founder of international law, Grotius advanced a generous array of rights for European nations to punish, wage war, and appropriate land. Europe’s storied protoliberal legal theorists didn’t want to end conquest but regulate how it was executed.

— America, América by Greg Grandin