On Hüsnükabul, we go beyond surface-level events with Vijay Prashad and Waseem Ahmad Siddiqui to discuss the fundamental structures governing our world. Taking Walter Benjamin's concept of 'Now-Time' as a starting point, we tune in to a striking perspective that contrasts Europe's ordeal with fascism against the centuries-long suffering of the Global South.
Waseem Ahmad Siddiqui: Hi Vijay, thank you for accepting my invitation and welcome to our radio program.
Vijay Prashad: Thanks a lot for having me.
Waseem Ahmad Siddiqui: Vijay the reason I invited you here today. There is ongoing complexity on articulation of what we are going through? That is to say, what are we witnessing? And what this present-moment where we all are in telling us? These questions are not new. But they do come to us in a time when things get overlap with one another and our eyes gets shatters. You may remember, the painting of Paul Klee: Angelus Novus. The German philosopher and thinker Walter Benjamin writes about it, by expressing his self on on the complexity of articulation and complexity of understanding present moment in his last essay: Theses on the Philosophy of History in 1940.
During the period when the German Nazis were committing genocide against the Jews, Walter Benjamin, like many others, wanted to escape the genocide but he couldn’t and committed suicide in Portbou, on the border between Spain and France. In that essay, Walter Benjamin, uses the German word “Jetztzeit.” The now-time or the present moment. The complexity of the present moment. Everything we are witnessing right now comes at us like a gust of wind. And the articulation has become very difficult.
My first question to you is about articulation. That is to say, how do you see and define the time we all are in? What words do you have when you look or hear to the injustices and brutality committed towards humanity, whether its Palestine( where more than 70,000 peoples killed in Gaza since Israel genocide began, October 7, 2023) whether its Iran, (where the large amount of protest are taking place and according to Iranian human right based platform in Norway, records 3000 peoples killed in recent protests)whether its Venezuela (where the abduction of Nicolas Maduro president occured), whether its America (where on January 7, 2026, Renée Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, was fatally shot in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross) whether its Turkey and Syria, especially as we are currently witnessing the tension in Syria. The Turkey plays a very important role historically in Syria. It has already been one year almost, Ahmed Alşarra temporay government. After Assad regime. There is a current ceasefire deal between Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Syrian government. But what we witness at least in Turkey, the Kurdish minority in Rojava is going through oppression. We can count many other places like Ukrain, Germany India, Pakistan, Azerbaycan and many others.
May you help me understand, by giving your reflection on this very present moment we all are in? Was there a period in the past like this?
Vijay Prashad: Yeah, I mean, let's go back to Walter Benjamin's text, you know, just to start. I actually don't agree with the pessimism of that text. I don't agree with the concept of the now-time because in a way that's banal. We always live in the now-time, and the now-time is always an increasingly complicated. See, maybe there was a time when, when humans were not so interconnected. When we lived much more local lives as a consequence of different levels of technology. You know, your and my families probably knew each other a long time ago somewhere in Lahore. You know where my grandparents came from just outside Lahore, from an important Sikh community just outside Lahore. Maybe they knew each other. Who knows? Their radius of knowledge and travel was very narrow. They didn't travel like you to Turkey or like me to Chile. They lived where they lived. But now, or rather over the last 200 years, maybe even longer, since the time of the Columbus journey across the Atlantic, the world has become so completely interconnected. That complexity of knowledge, information, wisdom, different theories of the world, complexities of knowledge and complexities of events is overpowering. It has been like this and will continue to be like this. I mean, look, we live in 2026. Something happens in Iran, we know about it instantaneously.
This enters into the flood bank of our knowledge. Look at what you did. You recited a series of atrocities, one after the other. Now how do we understand this? Well, why should we? Why should you understand it? It's a chaos of information because there's just too much happening in the world for one person, you or me, to fathom. Some of it is not that necessary for us to understand what happened today in Azerbaijan. Do you know? Well, I don't know. Well, this happened. Well, okay. What does it matter to my life? There's an old story in an old novel which said, look, I'm eating a banana in my country, if I eat a banana and I'm told that five people die because I'm eating the banana, does it bother me? Well, I don't know those five people. So they are distant from me. And are they really being killed because I'm eating the banana. So there is a way in which we have become so interconnected and also violence has become so banal because of the interconnection. You know, there's just too much stuff happening. People can't absorb it. They say things like, I don't want to watch the news. I don't want to hear what's going on because it's overwhelming. Well, and that's because in a sense, events have overcome structures in our minds. We are stuck at the level of events. So when Benjamin writes, you know, we are in the now time, things are dense. He's talking about the rise of fascism.
Waseem Ahmad Siddiqui: Exactly.
Vijay Prashad: He's talking about mass death. But if I ever met, let's say we met in the Pyrenees. When he was thinking these thoughts, I would have said to him, listen, Walter Benjamin, you know, for hundreds of years out in the colonies, people have experienced what you call the now time, mass, mass displacements and killing of people. Yeah, I mean, what you are seeing happen in Germany, the attempted extinction of the European Jewish people that happened to people across the global south for a very long period of time. And we have to fight it. We can't collapse into the event. We have to fight it. But in order to fight it, we can't just fight it event by event, we have to also see what are the underlying structures. So that is what our Institute does. It is interested not merely in event by event, atrocity by atrocity, but by understanding the structure. So what is the structure at present? For decades, the United States and the Europeans, for decades they have dominated the world system. I'm saying for decades, I'm not saying for centuries, because there was a time when they were on the back foot. After the end of formal colonialism, Europe and the United States was a little bit on the back foot.
They had to deal with the fact that anti colonial movements were on the rise. They were pushing back against colonialism, against the imposition of new forms of colonialism. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has really felt like it has dominated the world. And the West's domination of the world has come at an enormous cost. We call the Global south in some sense the sacrifice zone for the West's ambitions. You know, the west sacrificed the lives of people in the global south so people in the west could live luxurious lives. Well, unfortunately for the west, that time is ending and the Global south no longer wants to be the sacrifice zone. In that moment of turbulence, the west is trying to hold on as best as possible, using military force as much as possible, whether it's against the Palestinians in Gaza or the Iranians or the Venezuelans or the Chinese or the Russians or anybody, they will use any means. So this is a period of great violence, but it's not violence that is new to people in the global south. This is not worse than the period of formal colonialism. The massacres in Algeria, the massacres in Cameroon, and I'm talking about the mid 20th century.
The massacres in Brazil after the coup in 1964, 1 million Communists killed in Indonesia after the coup in 1965. This is not necessarily. This doesn't even come close to those numbers. One million communists and their supporters killed in Indonesia in 1965. Okay, this doesn't come close. So no, I reject Benjamin's idea that the present is atrocious and too difficult to understand. I'm a Marxist. I don't believe in utopianism like that or utopian despair. Because that text you're referring to on the philosophy of history is a text of utopian despair. You know, the angel of history is looking backward and seeing the ruin. I don't accept that. I don't accept that. Because people who've been poor for hundreds of years, they don't look back and say, look our lives were terrible. Then they say, look, now maybe our children can eat and learn to read and have a light bulb and we don't have to scratch the surface of the earth to bring out a potato. They don't look back and say, my God, it's a ruin. That's a European. Looking at European civilization and paralyzed, that doesn't reflect anything Waseem of our lives.
We don't look back and say, hey, there's the Mughal empire, we are crying for it. No, we are not crying for it. We are not crying for the British Empire. We are looking forward and saying, come the day when every child in Lahore, that city of my ancestors and that city of your family, come the day when every child in Lahore will be able to read, will be able to go to sleep at night without being hungry. We are looking forward, not backward. I reject that.
