For much more than 4 months now, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western nations around the world have been staunchly supporting Israel’s war on Gaza. As of now, the Israeli military has killed much more than 28,000 Palestinians, such as additional than 12,000 little ones.
On January 26, the Worldwide Court docket of Justice dominated that “at the very least some of the functions and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been fully commited by Israel in Gaza appear to be able of slipping in just the provisions of the [Genocide] Conference,” and that South Africa’s assert that Israel is committing genocidal acts is “plausible”. Yet, the West ongoing to stand by Israel.
Then when Israel alleged that staff members of the United Nations Aid and Is effective Company for Palestine Refugees in the Close to East (UNRWA) were being joined to Hamas, the US, the Uk, Germany, and far more than a dozen other nations suspended their funding, as Palestinians in Gaza confronted hunger.
Regardless of Western complicity in actions the world’s top court docket is recognising as genocidal, the West even now assigns itself all fashion of superiority in civilised societal behaviour. Western countries continue to honour on their own as “the excellent guys”.
“I acquired in trouble many periods for saying you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist. I make no apologies for that. That is a actuality,” President Joe Biden claimed in a speech at a non-public campaign reception in Massachusetts in early December, when the loss of life toll in Gaza by now stood at 16,200. “We’ve [Americans] by no means thought just about anything is outside of our capability, from curing cancer this time all-around to anything we have at any time completed. I really necessarily mean it,” he additional.
It can take a specific kind of narcissism for a environment chief to declare himself a 50-yr-extended adherent to a white supremacist ideology that excuses apartheid, settler-colonialism, and genocide and then to flip to the greatness of the US and all its “possibilities”, as if the US has only been sprinkling pixie dust around the globe and not intervening with brutal navy and financial electricity over the earlier 130 yrs.
But the US president is not by yourself in his self-delusion. At the Conservative Close friends of Israel accumulating in London very last thirty day period, Uk Primary Minister Rishi Sunak showed unwavering aid for Israeli attacks on Gaza and the West Lender. “There is a horrific irony in Israel, of all nations getting accused of genocide,” Sunak said, labelling South Africa’s case against Israel “completely unjustified”.
The “horrific irony” is that Israel, as a Western ally, cannot be accused of genocide for the reason that it is a person of “the good guys”. The “bad guys” can only be non-Western (truly, non-white) nations, these kinds of as South Africa.
Biden, Sunak et al however imagine that as the leaders of the produced earth, they are earning easy to understand rational options when they are combating wars and killing individuals in the title of self-defence or less than the guise of battling “terrorism”.
Even with the protest of tens of thousands and thousands persons around the planet and the deaths of tens of countless numbers of Palestinians, the razing of Gaza and other crimes versus humanity, the disregard for the ongoing war in Sudan and the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Western leaders still consider Western capitalism and democratic institutions will conserve the world.
In his ebook The Clash of Civilizations (1996), the late political scientist Samuel Huntington warned about the dangers of the Western delusion that the relaxation of the world ought to embrace its purported values. “The survival of the West is dependent on Us citizens reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as special not common,” he wrote.
But what Huntington didn’t understand about the West’s quest for a a single-environment civilisation is that today’s resentments toward it did not start off in the publish-Cold War period of the 1990s. They are a reaction to the trail of dying, destruction, and devouring of methods that Westerners have remaining powering ever due to the fact Christopher Columbus made his way to the Western Hemisphere and Vasco da Gama located a route all around Africa to South Asia, each in the 1490s.
The rest of the earth has been the West’s supply of plunder, initially as a result of the pillage of gold, silver, and gems from freshly invaded lands, then by way of the enslavement of thousands and thousands of Indigenous, African, and Asian peoples, and last but not least by the conquest of the previous empires of the East.
This belief in Western civilisation as excellent and righteous for the reason that of its whiteness is so ingrained in its lifestyle that youthful people today in the West grow up with no any one in their lives at any time questioning it. That is, until eventually anyone like me as a record professor arrives together and confronts this fundamental perception.
In my several many years of training historical past, my very own learners have usually gotten into it with me around my supposition that “Western civilisation” is a contradictory term.
“But the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice!” one student yelped, whilst a calmer college student, with a elevated hand, stated, “It’s unfortunate that atrocities transpired to the natives, but it is insulting to review what the Spanish did to what transpired to Rome.”
That was the sturdy pushback I obtained from a couple pupils in 1 of my entire world history classes a several years back again when I spoke of the barbarity of the Spanish conquests of the Aztecs and the Inca in the 16th century and the similarities involving those people invasions and the Vandal and Visigoth tribes who served conclude the Western Roman Empire.
I pointed out the achievements of the civilisations destroyed and the conquistadors and the Spanish clergymen burning virtually all Mayan writings, desecrating Mexica, Mayan, and Inca temples, and forcing the population into slavery and Christianity.
I have also endured vitriol from college students unwilling to even take into account the chance that the US and the West, having engaged in barbaric conduct with their have populations and across the world, might do so in the close to long term.
“It isn’t possible, because…no civilised society wants it occurring to them,” a person scholar stated decades in the past. “Americans would never acquire up arms against the federal government, specially with our military services, it is not rational. We would not be stupid enough to make this slip-up yet again. Our army would crush any insurrection,” is what another college student blurted out in the earlier calendar year, irrespective of proof of the opposite with the insurrection at the US Capitol Constructing on January 6, 2021.
Some college students had been also deep in the belief of the West as a good drive to take into consideration the apocalypse it visited on 60 million Indigenous men and women, wiping out up to 90 percent of the population inside of 100 a long time of Columbus’s initial make contact with.
We could not even explore the other genocides wrought in the identify of empire, colonialism, and capitalism: the 165 million South Asians the British starved, murdered, or labored to loss of life among 1880 and 1920 or the estimated 10 million Congolese who Belgians exterminated or the genocide of up to 100,000 Herero and Nama people by German forces in Namibia between 1904 and 1908.
My students’ perception in Western rationality remained sturdy even when the carnage of World Wars I and II was introduced up. In individuals conflicts, as several as 90 million civilians and assistance users were killed – among the them a lot more than 200,000 annihilated in the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Western narcissism is precisely why my pupils have issues accepting that Western civilisation contradicts itself at just about every switch. As the late put up-colonial scholar Edward Said wrote in Orientalism (1978), “It can be argued that the important ingredient in European tradition is exactly what produced [Western civilisation] hegemonic both of those in and outdoors Europe: the strategy of European identity as a superior just one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.”
This belief in Western superiority means constantly staying on the correct aspect of historical past, even while there are lots of illustrations of Western irrationality, barbarism, and brutality in its interventions in the Middle East and the rest of the earth. Western narcissism indicates the US and West will only raise a finger to aid the Palestinians if pressured to by the entire world and by their very own citizens.
That roughly 50 percent of Individuals ages 18-29 believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is encouraging, but by itself not plenty of to close US and Western complicity in Israel’s crimes.
The views expressed in this short article are the author’s have and do not essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
