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I mammas russiske verden er Russland et godt og heltemodig land som ikke har noe annet valg enn å slåss. Det betyr ikke at hun er hjerteløs, bare veldig sannhetsforvirret. Og derfor er det nok også veldig vondt for mamma at sønnen hennes ikke for sitt bare liv vil innse den russiske sannheten.

— Russiske spesialiteter by Ute Neumann, Dmitrij Kapitelman

De investerte sparepengene forduftet som stinkende fiskesuppe. Og så bestemte mamma at de snaut to tusen mark som var igjen, skulle gå til å åpne et магазин. Pappa bestemte det riktignok, han også, men mer som en slags post-avgjørende andrestemme.

— Russiske spesialiteter by Ute Neumann, Dmitrij Kapitelman

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)