A sharp critique of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization The first essential question arises: What, exactly, is the West? Is it a set of institutions? A ruling class? States? Ideologies? Or is it a civilizational essence? The book offers no clear answer. Instead, it moves through sweeping formulations that turn the West into a spectral totality — a ghostly abstraction that, precisely when it should point its finger at concrete structures, replaces them with metaphors. The result is a perilous slippage: the real machinery that produces, distributes, and normalizes violence disappears, replaced by a single icon — “white civilisation.” But who constructs this civilization? Who fights within it? What contradictions tear through its interior? Here lies the book’s central flaw: its analysis does not explain power; it assigns essence. Instead of asking which institutions, with...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51