I have not read the book, but am familiar with the thesis: white men want to rule the world and this really sucks because everyone else is better than us. That’s pretty close. A longer summary is here: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2011/07/johannes-fabian-time-and-other.html
Seriously, the gist of the book as I understand it is that Western culture tends to assume things about cultural Others which are untrue and patronizing, namely that they are culturally static, and absent outside contact tend to remain the same.
Here is the point I want to make: it is debatable whether this is true or not of the West–clearly many military veterans understand Afghans and Iraqis far better than people who have never even been over there–but it is CATEGORICALLY true for leftists.
What got me to thinking about this was the widespread belief among Leftists, then and now, that our retreat from Vietnam–from a war we had won and which only needed maintenance, exactly like Iraq–was a GOOD thing. They assume that since we were over there shooting people, that this was intrinsically, definitionally, a bad thing. They assume the Vietnamese were a static, homogeneous, culturally united, peaceful people, and that war only came because of us.
They see, in other words, a picture they have created in their minds, not what is actually there.
Place yourself imaginarily in Mosul at this moment. There is shooting in the streets. People are being executed. Women and children are being raped. Imagine families hiding in terror in their bedrooms, knowing the lock on their front door will never hold. Imagine children looking to their father for protection, and him knowing he cannot do anything.
This is what Obama has engineered. This is what he has created as a policy.
The thing with narcissists is they never see the world as it is. It could be seen primarily as a perceptual defect, a type of hallucinatory capacity to see things which are not there. If you simply define America as always an oppressor, then leaving a theater of oppression is a good thing, period. There is no ambiguity.
But this calculus makes not even a RUDIMENTARY effort at defining the Good, at weighing one option against another. It does not consider rape and murder to be crimes against humanity. They are only crimes when committed by one set of predefined, timeless Others against a predefined Us.
This is the very tribalism which Fabian’s book seeks to explore and reduce. As always with the leftists, they are pursuing in reality the very evil they claim to oppose.
As it often does with me, this becomes personal. I have a great many emotional scars to heal, and this is one of them. There is no difference between my mothers refusal to recognize me as I matured–to recognize that I existed in my own Time–and the Left’s refusal to recognize the horror and very human suffering they have enabled through their idiotic blindness.
And there is a sadism to all this, underlaying it all. Obama almost consciously is spitting in the face of our military, who are cultural Others to him, in exactly the Fabian sense, and getting satisfaction from it. The Left delighted in the torment our chosen retreat from Vietnam caused our veterans.
This is all madness.