NM's blog

“More on the crisis of liberal expertise. This exchange over Yuri Slezkine's review on the "Western civilization" is a good illustration of how some scholars of Ukraine have managed to miss not only what has happened in the world since 2022 — saying without irony that the West offers an alternative to Russian barbarism in Ukraine, after Gaza and Iran, is simply nauseating — but also the developments within Ukraine itself (or perhaps still strategically obfuscating them). Slezkine's response at the end, on why Ukraine is an ethnonationalist state, is very strong.” —Volodymyr Eshchenko’s comment on Why ‘the West’?

The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicisation of power. Becoming Western has meant becoming transformed according to these things, albeit in a variety of historical circumstances and with varying degrees of thoroughness. For conscripts of Western civilization this transformation implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated—even violently—and others put in their place. The modern state, invented in Europe, is the universal condition of that transformation—and of its 'higher truth'. — Talal Asad,  Conscripts of Western Civilization , 1992, quoted in Joseph Massad's Islam in Liberalism, 2015, pp. 251-2

“There is no redressing the sustained history of US and European universities' involvement with slavery, racism and colonialism without first dismantling its sustained ideological premise.”