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)