Ian Buruma quotes

Ian Buruma is a Dutch writer, historian, and journalist known for his work on Asian culture and politics. His books and essays often explore issues of identity, freedom, and cultural conflict. He has taught at several universities and served as an editor at major publications. Here are 6 of his quotes:

The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom. (Ian Buruma)
Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome. View quote
Ian Buruma
To isolate the revolutionary ideologues and their killers we must gain the trust of the majority of Muslims. This can only happen if they are treated as equal citizens, not just in theory, and have access to decent education and jobs. View quote
Ian Buruma
Obama is neither a socialist, nor a mere political accountant. He has some modest ideals, and may yet be an excellent president. But what is needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on how to promote justice, equality and freedom in the world. Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev, assisted in the end of an ideology, which once offered hope, and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision, which will lead to progress, but this time, we hope, without tyranny. View quote
Ian Buruma
It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism. View quote
Ian Buruma
But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save "Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from "neo-colonialism,” than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al.) simply because they opposed "Western imperialism.” As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists, but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests. View quote
Ian Buruma