The Blind Empire: Why the West Can't See it's Failing so Hard | Prof. Dr. Irfan Ahmad

## Introduction The conversation with Prof. Dr. Irfan Ahmad forces a difficult question: how can some of the West’s most vaunted moral and philosophical resources—universal reason, public deliberation, humanist consensus—be marshalled in ways that obscure violence, erase history, and legitimate war? The exchange reads less like a simple critique of one thinker than like a diagnosis of a wider intellectual pathology. It suggests that certain strands of Western thought, even on the left, possess structural blind spots that render them unable or unwilling to place colonialism, dispossession, and settler violence at the center of moral reckoning. That failure has real consequences when it comes to how crises like Gaza are framed, debated, and acted upon. ## Habermas and German public life Habermas occupies an outsized place in postwar German intellectual life: a public philosopher who spoke in auditoriums, wrote for newspapers, and became a symbol of a rational, democratic culture. The conversation emphasizes how his authority was not merely academic but civic. His interventions mattered to a wide public and, importantly, his positions were bound up with broader national narratives. In postwar Germany, the reconstruction of national identity and foreign policy included an element of Staatsräson—a state reason that prioritized the security and legitimacy of Israel as part of Germany’s moral-political settlement. That context helps explain why Habermas’ public statements were heard not only as philosophical reflections but as contributions to a national political posture. What emerges from the discussion is an insistence that we must read influential public intellectuals against the political ecosystems they inhabit. Habermas’s stature meant his voice had performative force. When he declared certain acts not genocidal or urged solidarity couched in universal terms, those statements did more than interpret reality: they shaped a public moral horizon. The exchange underlines how public intellectuals can amplify state sensibilities—sometimes without acknowledging how those sensibilities condition what counts as history, grievance, or legitimate critique. ## Western Marxism and imperial blind spots A central line of argument in the conversation is that Habermas must be situated within a lineage of Western Marxism that developed particular priorities and blind spots. Western Marxism, especially as it emerged from the Frankfurt School, reoriented Marxist critique toward culture, reason, and the critique of instrumental rationality. That move produced rich analyses of modernity and domination but did so within a frame that often kept imperialism and settler colonialism at the margins. Prof. Ahmad reminds us that even first-generation Frankfurt figures—whose work has been read as radical—sometimes expressed views that would now appear ethnocentric or politically selective. The famous example of Adorno and Horkheimer’s commentary on the Suez nationalization exposes a tendency: an intellectual language that universalizes certain forms of justice while failing to register anticolonial assertion as legitimate resistance. The conversation therefore reframes the problem not merely as individual failing but as a structural feature of a tradition: by privileging certain categories of reason, the Western left can become blind to the lived realities of imperial-subject peoples. This is not simply about omission; it is about how theoretical priorities shape moral attention. In many non-Western contexts, activists and Marxists set imperial domination and everyday survival as primary problems. When Western theorists subsume struggle under abstract categories of culture and reason, they risk reordering radical priorities in ways that mute claims emerging from colonized contexts. ## Gaza and the erasure of history The exchange turns acutely to Gaza to show the stakes of such intellectual practices. A striking critique in the conversation concerns how Western public debate often compressed complex histories into single moments—most notably the fixation on October 7th as the purported origin of the crisis. Such temporal myopia enables a narrative in which violence appears unmoored from history, as if prior dispossession, occupation, and blockade did not constitute a continuum that shapes all subsequent events. Prof. Ahmad accuses prominent voices of producing a de-historicized account: one that treats Palestinian suffering as a sudden problem rather than the product of long-standing settler-colonial relations. The lexical choices that emerged—references to “population” versus “Jewish life,” the selective invocation of anti-Semitism without parallel concern for Islamophobia—reveal how language can subtly dehumanize, flatten, or reassign moral weight. The conversation stresses that failing to contextualize October 7th within settler colonialism, displacement, and asymmetrical power is not neutral omission. It is a political act that shapes public sympathy, policy, and the vocabulary of rights. The broader lesson is that historical erasure is frequently a rhetorical strategy. By insisting on ahistorical universals—reason, consensus, the civilized norm—Western discourse can exclude the histories that make claims for justice intelligible in the first place. ## Colonialism missing from Western thought One of the conversation’s sharpest claims is that colonialism has been effectively excised from mainstream Western intellectual and civic life. Across media, education, and philosophy, colonialism is often relegated to a past epoch—an unfortunate chapter that has been closed. That cultural forgetting produces a double illusion: that colonial wrongs have been fully redressed and that Western modernity can be read without recourse to empire. Prof. Ahmad challenges that assumption by insisting colonialism is not merely historical backdrop but an active structural condition shaping contemporary politics. The failure to place colonialism at the center of modernity’s analysis makes it difficult to account for global inequalities, refugee crises, and the territorialities that produce recurring violence. The discussion makes an important analytical move: it rejects the tidy chronology that consigns imperial wrongdoing to the nineteenth century and instead treats colonization as an ongoing operation—a set of institutions, legalities, and practices that continue to dispossess. This analytic oversight helps explain why Western publics sometimes struggle to perceive Palestinian claims through a decolonial lens. If colonialism is not an operative category, then settler practices are rendered exceptional rather than systemic, and moral arguments can be re-routed toward protecting state sovereignty rather than contesting the conditions that produced dispossession. ## Habermas as an ethnic thinker One of Prof. Ahmad’s more provocative offerings is the description of Habermas as “an ethnic thinker par excellence.” That phrase does not reduce Habermas to crude prejudice but rather highlights how a philosophical corpus can be inflected by the ethnic-political commitments of a particular national context. The claim is that Habermas’s thought—especially in its public utterances—exhibits a selective empathy that privileges certain forms of life and political belonging. Analyzed through this lens, Habermas’s work shows how high theory can carry latent allegiances: a willingness to frame Jewish life as an absolute moral referent in post-Holocaust Germany while treating Palestinian existence as a less capacious category—sometimes linguistically neutralized into “population.” The conversation suggests this is no mere oversight but an alignment with a national ethos shaped by memory politics and state responsibility. By calling Habermas an ethnic thinker, the analysis demands that we scrutinize how intellectual universalism may be unevenly distributed across lives deemed more or less worthy of m

The Blind Empire: Why the West Can't See it's Failing so Hard | Prof. Dr. Irfan Ahmad This conversation is a direct challenge to the moral claims of Western philosophy in the face of Gaza. I speak with Professor Dr. Irfan Ahmad, professor of anthropology and sociology at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul. The discussion looks at Habermas as a major German public intellectual, then moves into Western Marxism, colonial blind spots, and the way Palestine is pushed out of the moral frame. I also press the question of universalism, and the exchange shows how claims of reason, consensus, and humanism can turn into cover for power, war, and selective silence. In the end, the episode is both a critique of Habermas and a wider critique of the West’s refusal to face colonialism as a living structure. Links: DOI of Irfan's article on Habermas: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517. 2025.2466001 Website: https://www.irfanahmad.org/ Academia page: https://ibnhaldun.academia. edu/ProfIrfanAhmad ResearchGate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Irfan-Ahmad-24 Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:22 Habermas and German public life 00:06:22 Western Marxism and imperial blind spots 00:11:14 Gaza and the erasure of history 00:18:54 Colonialism missing from Western thought 00:32:06 Habermas as an ethnic thinker 00:42:06 Consensus talk and support for war 00:58:35 Final reflections and guest links #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to *Neutrality Studies*. Today I’m joined by Professor Dr. Irfan Ahmad, a professor of anthropology and sociology at Ibn Khaldun University in Istanbul. Professor Ahmad also spent five years at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. He recently wrote a very interesting paper on Habermas as an “ethnic thinker par excellence,” focusing on critique, Palestine, and the role of intellectuals. In this paper, he discusses Habermas’ philosophy. Mr. Habermas, of course, passed away recently, on the 14th of March this year. He was one of Germany’s foremost intellectuals of our time. But there were very serious problems when it comes to his approach to other religions, and especially to the Gaza genocide. And this is what we want to discuss today. So, Professor Ahmad, welcome. #Irfan Ahmad Thank you, Pascal. It’s lovely to be in conversation with you, and I’m glad we’ll have an interesting discussion about Habermas—his role as a public intellectual, but also his relevance for our time, especially in this time of war, and so on and so forth. -- 1 of 20 -- #Pascal Can we start with that? Could you give us your interpretation of Habermas as a philosopher and as a public intellectual in Germany? And how important is he there? #Irfan Ahmad Well, as you know, the Chancellor of Germany tweeted about his death, describing how important he was. It’s true that in Germany—where I worked as a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for almost five years—when Habermas spoke in an auditorium, the whole place used to be full. So people, not simply intellectuals, came to listen. As you know, Habermas was also initially a journalist, so he used to write for newspapers and comment on political and public issues. He wasn’t an ivory-tower type of intellectual; he also intervened in public debates. He was very crucial for Germany, but not only for Germany—also beyond. For example, the Spanish newspaper *El País* described Habermas in 2023, and I have this written down, as “the most famous living philosopher in the world.” #Pascal Right. #Irfan Ahmad Okay. And also Europe’s greatest intellectual. So this is just one of the many descriptions—various people have described him and his work differently. Some see him as a cosmopolitan philosopher, and so on and so forth. In Germany, of course, he’s very important in terms of teaching, research, public debate, and so on. People write about him and discuss him, whether in agreement or disagreement. In that sense, some even say he’s the last great rationalist philosopher. #Pascal Okay. #Irfan Ahmad Okay. #Pascal And the important thing about him is that he achieved that level of fame—within the hall of fame of German philosophers—while still alive, right? Habermas was born in 1929 and died, I think, at the age of 96. He wrote a tremendous number of works and spoke publicly. So his impact on today’s -- 2 of 20 -- Germany, on Germany’s understanding of itself as a state that still produces great intellectuals— Habermas is very important to that, isn’t he? #Irfan Ahmad True. But then one also has to see—because, as you know, there are many ways to read Habermas. One reading is, and this is not simply among intellectuals or activists within Germany but also well beyond Germany, in Europe and North America—to see his writing and thinking in the tradition of leftist scholarship or left thinking. That’s true, but we have to make a distinction: this is a form of Western Marxism. And this Western Marxism is not the same as the forms of thinking or Marxism in other parts of the world—how Marxism operates in Latin America, in Europe, in Asia, Southeast Asia, and in the Middle East. So he’s surely placed in that left tradition, but it’s a Western Marxism. The Frankfurt School itself, as you know, was established in 1923, in response to the Russian Revolution of 1917—a few years after the Bolshevik Revolution. That was how German intellectuals at the time responded. The point isn’t that it had nothing to do with Marxism elsewhere—of course it did—but its core concern was Europe, an understanding of Marxism from a European or Western perspective. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this could happen again at any time. So please consider subscribing not only here but also to my mailing list on Substack—that’s pascallottaz.substack.com. The link will be in the description below. And now, back to the video. What’s the big difference between the Western and the Eastern—or the rest, the other—interpretations of Marxism, just in a nutshell? #Irfan Ahmad Yeah, so, for example, in the 80s and 90s, if you talked to a left activist in India and brought up ecological problems or hygiene in the city and so on, most likely a Marxist in Delhi or Bombay would tell you that this is a very bourgeois concern—because they were concerned about bread and butter. There were people who couldn’t afford a meal a day, and you’re talking about ecological issues. Which is not to say they were opposed to it, but it was a question of priority. From their perspective, unless this hardcore economic imbalance—or the question of imperialism—is addressed first, those other issues come later. This is very interesting because, you see, the first-generation Frankfurt School theorist Horkheimer— his response to the question of imperialism was not how Marxists in other parts of the world saw it. And what I want to say here is this: in 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser was one of the leaders of -- 3 of 20 -- the Non-Aligned Movement, he nationalized the Suez Canal. That move was greeted by left or left- oriented intellectuals in the non-Western world very differently. The Western press described Nasser as a Hitler, a new Mussolini. #Pascal Yeah. #Irfan Ahmad Okay. And I want to say this: this is a joint statement by Adorno and Horkheimer on the 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal. Okay. #Irfan Ahmad By the way, Horkheimer and Adorno—these were the two leading intellectuals of the first generation. They weren’t necessarily on the same page; they also had internal differences. Horkheimer was considered more orthodox. But this is the statement they jointly issued, and it reads as follows: “These Arab robber estates have been on the lookout for years for an opportunity to fall upon Israel and slaughter the Jews who have found refuge there.” This is a statement from 1956. #Pascal Of the Frankfurt School—the first generation of people who were generally considered left in the intellectual discourse in Europe. #Irfan Ahmad Exactly. Now, you might also... #Pascal Should we call them the Zionist left? Does Zionism have something to do with it? Or why did they write something like that? #Irfan Ahmad But, Pascal, you might be surprised that Horkheimer later on—if this is the left—there’s another quote where he says, “I believe that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now, as far as prosperity and justice are concerned.” So this is Horkheimer, okay? Now, the question is, many scholars and intellectuals after Habermas’s death say that Habermas made some deviation from Marxism. And the assumption is that the early generation—like Horkheimer and Adorno—were truly left, and Habermas was making some kind of -- 4 of 20 -- departure. But the point is, it’s not really a departure if you read it this way. If Horkheimer thinks that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations, then… no. So the assumption that Horkheimer was more radical and Habermas became less so doesn’t quite hold. #Pascal Yeah. #Irfan Ahmad But that’s not how it is. #Pascal And, you know, sorry to the audience listening, because we probably should have prefaced this with some information about how Habermas was vocal in the last two years about the genocide in Gaza— I mean, how he framed everything that was happening around Israel and Palestine. Could you maybe explain that to us, Irfan? Like, what did he say in the last years of his life about Israel and Palestine? #Irfan Ahmad Yeah, so, you see, the event happened on October 7th. I think about five weeks later, he issued a statement with three other scholars—most of them were his friends or people he had worked with. The statement was called *Principles of Solidarity.* #Pascal Solidarity with Israel. #Irfan Ahmad The title is simply *Principles of Solidarity.* It doesn’t mention Israel or Palestine. But within the statement, what’s important is that he says people who call it a genocidal war are in error. So for him, it was not a genocide. That’s one point. The second point is that he was concerned about—and this is very important for your listeners and viewers to note—that much like Immanuel Kant, Habermas’s thinking is state-oriented. In Germany, it’s called *Staatsräson.* After World War II, it became the official policy of the German state that the viability and integrity of Germany are predicated on the safety and integrity of Israel as a new state. So whatever he’s saying, he’s connecting it to that, because in making that statement, he takes it as his responsibility to also defend the state of Israel. -- 5 of 20 -- And my question was, as an intellectual, should you be concerned about defending another state? And this in itself is very interesting—because as a German citizen, and given your field is international relations and so on, we talk about national sovereignty and so forth. So to what extent is it an exercise of Germany’s national sovereignty when you’re making a statement not about your own sovereignty, but about the integrity and sovereignty of another nation-state? And then, in the statement, he says there is rising anti-Semitism—which is true—but he says nothing about Islamophobia. Because, as we know, after 9/11, the whole world has seen a massive rise in Islamophobia, including in Germany. #Pascal Yeah. #Irfan Ahmad When I lived there, it was a very selective statement. In that statement, he talks about Jews in terms of Jewish life. Palestinians are mentioned, but he uses the word “population.” #Pascal Palestinian population versus Jewish life. #Irfan Ahmad Jewish life. And we can go into the semantic and lexical aspects. “Population” is also used to describe the n