For greater than 4 months now, america, the UK, and different Western nations have been staunchly supporting Israel’s warfare on Gaza. As of now, the Israeli military has killed greater than 28,000 Palestinians, together with greater than 12,000 youngsters.
On January 26, the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice dominated that “no less than a few of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been dedicated by Israel in Gaza seem like able to falling inside the provisions of the [Genocide] Conference,” and that South Africa’s declare that Israel is committing genocidal acts is “believable”. However, the West continued to face by Israel.
Then when Israel alleged that staff of the United Nations Aid and Works Company for Palestine Refugees within the Close to East (UNRWA) had been linked to Hamas, the US, the UK, Germany, and greater than a dozen different nations suspended their funding, as Palestinians in Gaza confronted hunger.
Regardless of Western complicity in actions the world’s high courtroom is recognising as genocidal, the West nonetheless assigns itself all method of superiority in civilised societal behaviour. Western nations nonetheless honour themselves as “the nice guys”.
“I acquired in hassle many occasions for saying you don’t must be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I’m a Zionist. I make no apologies for that. That’s a actuality,” President Joe Biden mentioned in a speech at a personal marketing campaign reception in Massachusetts in early December, when the demise toll in Gaza already stood at 16,200. “We’ve [Americans] by no means thought something is past our capability, from curing most cancers this time round to every thing we’ve ever finished. I actually imply it,” he added.
It takes a particular sort of narcissism for a world chief to declare himself a 50-year-long adherent to a white supremacist ideology that excuses apartheid, settler-colonialism, and genocide after which to show to the greatness of the US and all its “potentialities”, as if the US has solely been sprinkling pixie mud all over the world and never intervening with brutal navy and financial energy over the previous 130 years.
However the US president will not be alone in his self-delusion. On the Conservative Associates of Israel gathering in London final month, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak confirmed unwavering assist for Israeli assaults on Gaza and the West Financial institution. “There’s a horrific irony in Israel, of all nations being accused of genocide,” Sunak mentioned, labelling South Africa’s case in opposition to Israel “fully unjustified”.
The “horrific irony” is that Israel, as a Western ally, can’t be accused of genocide as a result of it’s considered one of “the nice guys”. The “dangerous guys” can solely be non-Western (actually, non-white) nations, similar to South Africa.
Biden, Sunak et al nonetheless imagine that because the leaders of the developed world, they’re making comprehensible rational selections when they’re combating wars and killing individuals within the identify of self-defence or underneath the guise of combating “terrorism”.
Regardless of the protest of tens of thousands and thousands individuals all over the world and the deaths of tens of 1000’s of Palestinians, the razing of Gaza and different crimes in opposition to humanity, the disregard for the continued warfare in Sudan and the battle within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Western leaders nonetheless imagine Western capitalism and democratic establishments will save the world.
In his guide The Conflict of Civilizations (1996), the late political scientist Samuel Huntington warned in regards to the risks of the Western delusion that the remainder of the world ought to embrace its purported values. “The survival of the West is dependent upon People reaffirming their Western id and Westerners accepting their civilization as distinctive not common,” he wrote.
However what Huntington didn’t perceive in regards to the West’s quest for a one-world civilisation is that at this time’s resentments towards it didn’t begin within the post-Chilly Battle period of the Nineteen Nineties. They’re a response to the path of demise, destruction, and devouring of assets that Westerners have left behind ever since Christopher Columbus made his strategy to the Western Hemisphere and Vasco da Gama discovered a route round Africa to South Asia, each within the 1490s.
The remainder of the world has been the West’s supply of plunder, first by way of the pillage of gold, silver, and gems from newly invaded lands, then by way of the enslavement of thousands and thousands of Indigenous, African, and Asian peoples, and at last by way of the conquest of the outdated empires of the East.
This perception in Western civilisation as superior and righteous due to its whiteness is so ingrained in its tradition that younger individuals within the West develop up with out anybody of their lives ever questioning it. That’s, till somebody like me as a historical past professor comes alongside and confronts this elementary perception.
In my a few years of instructing historical past, my very own college students have usually gotten into it with me over my supposition that “Western civilisation” is a contradictory time period.
“However the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice!” one pupil yelped, whereas a calmer pupil, with a raised hand, mentioned, “It’s unlucky that atrocities occurred to the natives, however it’s insulting to match what the Spanish did to what occurred to Rome.”
That was the sturdy pushback I acquired from a number of college students in considered one of my world historical past programs a number of years again after I spoke of the barbarity of the Spanish conquests of the Aztecs and the Inca within the sixteenth century and the similarities between these invasions and the Vandal and Visigoth tribes who helped finish the Western Roman Empire.
I identified the achievements of the civilisations destroyed and the conquistadors and the Spanish clergymen burning almost all Mayan writings, desecrating Mexica, Mayan, and Inca temples, and forcing the inhabitants into slavery and Christianity.
I’ve additionally endured vitriol from college students unwilling to even contemplate the chance that the US and the West, having engaged in barbaric behaviour with their very own populations and throughout the globe, may achieve this within the close to future.
“It isn’t attainable, as a result of…no civilised society needs it taking place to them,” one pupil mentioned years in the past. “People would by no means take up arms in opposition to the federal government, particularly with our navy, it isn’t rational. We wouldn’t be silly sufficient to make this error once more. Our navy would crush any rebel,” is what one other pupil blurted out previously yr, regardless of proof of the alternative with the rebel on the US Capitol Constructing on January 6, 2021.
Some college students had been too deep within the perception of the West as a constructive power to contemplate the apocalypse it visited upon 60 million Indigenous individuals, wiping out as much as 90 p.c of the inhabitants inside 100 years of Columbus’s first contact.
We couldn’t even talk about the opposite genocides wrought within the identify of empire, colonialism, and capitalism: the 165 million South Asians the British starved, murdered, or labored to demise between 1880 and 1920; or the estimated 10 million Congolese who Belgians exterminated; or the genocide of as much as 100,000 Herero and Nama individuals by German forces in Namibia between 1904 and 1908.
My college students’ perception in Western rationality remained sturdy even when the carnage of World Wars I and II was introduced up. In these conflicts, as many as 90 million civilians and repair members had been killed – amongst them greater than 200,000 annihilated within the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Western narcissism is strictly why my college students have issue accepting that Western civilisation contradicts itself at each flip. Because the late post-colonial scholar Edward Mentioned wrote in Orientalism (1978), “It may be argued that the foremost part in European tradition is exactly what made [Western civilisation] hegemonic each in and out of doors Europe: the concept of European id as a superior one compared with all of the non-European peoples and cultures.”
This perception in Western superiority means all the time being on the best aspect of historical past, despite the fact that there are many examples of Western irrationality, barbarism, and brutality in its interventions within the Center East and the remainder of the world. Western narcissism means the US and West will solely elevate a finger to assist the Palestinians if pressured to by the world and by their very own residents.
That roughly half of People ages 18-29 imagine that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is encouraging, however by itself not sufficient to finish US and Western complicity in Israel’s crimes.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
