For greater than 4 months now, the United States, the United Kingdom, and different Western nations have been staunchly supporting Israel’s battle 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 International Court of Justice dominated that “at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention,” and that South Africa’s declare that Israel is committing genocidal acts is “plausible”. Nevertheless, the West continued to face by Israel.
Then when Israel alleged that workers of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees within the Near East (UNRWA) have 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.
Despite 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 good guys”.
“I got in trouble many times 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’s a reality,” President Joe Biden mentioned in a speech at a personal marketing campaign reception in Massachusetts in early December, when the dying toll in Gaza already stood at 16,200. “We’ve [Americans] never thought anything is beyond our capacity, from curing cancer this time around to everything we’ve ever done. I really mean 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 “possibilities”, as if the US has solely been sprinkling pixie mud world wide and never intervening with brutal navy and financial energy over the previous 130 years.
But the US president just isn’t alone in his self-delusion. At the Conservative Friends of Israel gathering in London final month, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak confirmed unwavering help for Israeli assaults on Gaza and the West Bank. “There is a horrific irony in Israel, of all countries being accused of genocide,” Sunak mentioned, labelling South Africa’s case towards Israel “completely unjustified”.
The “horrific irony” is that Israel, as a Western ally, can’t be accused of genocide as a result of it’s one among “the good guys”. The “bad guys” can solely be non-Western (actually, non-white) nations, reminiscent of South Africa.
Biden, Sunak et al nonetheless consider that because the leaders of the developed world, they’re making comprehensible rational selections when they’re combating wars and killing individuals within the title of self-defence or beneath the guise of combating “terrorism”.
Despite the protest of tens of tens of millions individuals world wide and the deaths of tens of hundreds of Palestinians, the razing of Gaza and different crimes towards humanity, the disregard for the continued battle in Sudan and the battle within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Western leaders nonetheless consider Western capitalism and democratic establishments will save the world.
In his ebook The Clash 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 depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal,” he wrote.
But what Huntington didn’t perceive in regards to the West’s quest for a one-world civilisation is that at the moment’s resentments towards it didn’t begin within the post-Cold War period of the Nineties. They are a response to the path of dying, destruction, and devouring of sources that Westerners have left behind ever since Christopher Columbus made his method 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 tens of millions of Indigenous, African, and Asian peoples, and at last by way of the conquest of the previous 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 is, till somebody like me as a historical past professor comes alongside and confronts this basic perception.
In my a few years of educating 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.
“But the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice!” one scholar yelped, whereas a calmer scholar, with a raised hand, mentioned, “It’s unfortunate that atrocities happened to the natives, but it’s insulting to compare what the Spanish did to what happened to Rome.”
That was the robust pushback I acquired from a number of college students in one among 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, would possibly achieve this within the close to future.
“It isn’t possible, because…no civilised society wants it happening to them,” one scholar mentioned years in the past. “Americans would never take up arms against the government, especially with our military, it isn’t rational. We wouldn’t be stupid enough to make this mistake again. Our military would crush any insurrection,” is what one other scholar blurted out up to now yr, regardless of proof of the other with the revolt on the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
Some college students have 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 % of the inhabitants inside 100 years of Columbus’s first contact.
We couldn’t even focus on the opposite genocides wrought within the title of empire, colonialism, and capitalism: the 165 million South Asians the British starved, murdered, or labored to dying 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 robust 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 have 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. As the late post-colonial scholar Edward Said wrote in Orientalism (1978), “It can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made [Western civilisation] hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.”
This perception in Western superiority means all the time being on the best facet of historical past, despite the fact that there are many examples of Western irrationality, barbarism, and brutality in its interventions within the Middle East and the remainder of the world. Western narcissism means the US and West will solely carry a finger to help the Palestinians if pressured to by the world and by their very own residents.
That roughly half of Americans ages 18-29 consider 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 replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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