Why Do We Still Treat Western Life as More Valuable than Other Life?
On the day that 16 people were killed with brutal violence at Bondi Beach, 9 people were added to the death toll of brutal violence in Gaza. One fact is news that has reverberated globally for weeks. One fact means almost nothing to the world. One fact has seen politics and laws debated. The other will change nothing. One fact will be weaponised. One fact will be brushed aside.
According to our politicians and our news media some lives are worth more than others. The people killed by the US in Venezuela, for example, matter very little to Western leaders. Imagine if Venezuelan forces conducted a raid on a US embassy and killed over 80 people, including civilians. Would we be debating Trump’s legitimacy and ignoring those victims?
How did we get here? How did we get to the point where the weight and value of human life is so vastly different? It has reached the insane point where each life lost in Australia or Israel is considerably more consequential than 100 lives lost in Palestine. To understand how this comes about we need to understand rationales given for this disparity in the value of human life. It is worth dissecting the phenomenon, because the fact that it feels so natural tells us that it involves core facts about our political culture and indoctrination.
For someone working in the news media the answer may be simply that the deaths in Bondi are news and the deaths in Gaza are not news. This begs the question of what makes something news. There are many reasons given for why certain things are newsworthy and others are not. When subjected to scrutiny these commonsensical seeming rationales tend to melt away. At the same time the journalism-specific reasons given offer no insight into why elites on all levels from policy makers to advertisers and from law enforcement to religious leaders all seem to agree what is worthy of note and consideration.
The question is broader than the news media but they are the screen on which the elite world projects itself. Those who have kept abreast of events in Gaza through more detailed and less selective sources know just how false the elite narrative of the Palestinian Genocide is. The events of the last two years show how rigid and, above all, tight-knit the Western elite political culture is. They lie glibly. They lie frequently. They lie with lazy assurance. And when pressed they lie with violent vehemence to shout down the truth by bullying force. They show an outward ideological conformity that more than matches that of any Soviet apparatchik. Part of their strength lies in the fact that many of them know that they are lying and many more simply don’t give a shit one way or the other. Truth is not relevant to these people. They know what they are supposed to say and do and they do it without question. They are so indoctrinated that they anticipate the Party Line with no prompting. In the subject of genocide, for example, there are no end of elected officials who will sneer with great pompous self-assurance at the actual experts, whom they portray as childish and partisan. The news media are, of course, never going to burst that ludicrous bubble by explaining South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel, nor the many genocide scholars who concur, let alone those scholars who have long claimed that Israel has been committing a slow genocide in Palestine since its inception.
The news media are the gibbering mouthparts of bloodthirsty imperialism. Their main function in this time has been to make credible blatant falsehoods, not to make everyone believe them, but to make issues seem complex and debatable. They equivocate and give ordinary people the false impression that behind the obvious one-sided slaughter that must be reported (albeit as minimally as possible) is a complex nuanced reality of intractable problems and ancient enmities. They are conditioned and disciplined by a system in which contradicting the lies of the powerful with easily confirmed facts is considered “editorialising”. They devote many column-inches and much footage to Israel’s official claims, even though this is an easily demonstrable disservice to their readers and viewers.
It is ultimately the confusion about the circumstances that makes it seem normal to be so emotionally invested in those murdered in Australia and so muted, if not numb, to those murdered in Gaza. It is the miasma of uncertainty that allows people to ignore their fragile assumptions. But people have many layers of rationalisation, some more overtly racist than others.
Some will claim that the people killed in Gaza are all or mostly “terrorists”. To those people I would ask that they read or view the detailed reporting from alternative media of deaths when they occur. The reports are a litany of obvious non-combatant deaths. Anyone who spends time investigating the reporting from on the ground in Gaza will know that the fatalities we know about are almost all civilians. No one can spend a few hours looking at the footage and believe for a second that it is some Pallywood fabrication. Civilians are being killed violently on a daily basis.
Some genuinely believe that the non-combatant deaths are the result of legitimate military operations, but they are collateral damage in Israel’s attempts to secure its own people. This too falls apart when examined. Not only does an Israeli Army database suggest that only 17% or less of the fatalities are of armed militants, we can also examine incident after incident after incident where there is no plausible legal target. Indeed we can see that Israel systematically targets non-combatants after having redefined them as “threats” in a blatant violation of the principles of distinction and of non-combatant immunity found in numerous statutes of International Humanitarian Law. Moreover, it chooses lethal force with no pretence of attempting other interventions. For example when Fadi and Jumaa Abu Asi, boys aged 8 and 11, crossed the unmarked “yellow line” in Gaza, the IDF deemed their searching for firewood to be “suspicious activity on the ground” constituting “an immediate threat” and murdered them by drone “to remove the threat.” That is not an error, that is a case of using a pretext to deliberately and gratuitously murder children. I might also cite the case of the murder of Hind Rajab, her family members, and the known and identified paramedics attempting to rescue her.
Anyone who wishes can compile example after example after example of clear cases of the deliberate murder of non-combatants, prisoners, and wounded. Those blatant examples must rightly colour our judgment of all civilian deaths caused by Israeli actions. Rhetoric such as Netanyahu’s pointed mention of Amalek, and the frequent use of dehumanising and often openly exterminatory speech by Israeli political, media, and even religious leaders further illuminates the situation. The final fatal blow to any claims that civilian deaths are an accidental by-product of legitimate military action comes from the openly avowed war aims of Israeli leaders. In rejecting a sovereign Palestinian state despite decades of rhetoric about a “2-state solution”, and in constantly taking further practical steps towards annexation while undermining the possibility of an independent state of Palestine, Israel shows it’s intentions. The obvious, if unstated, programme of annexation requires a great reduction of the Palestinian population.
The 71,000 people counted as being killed through Israel’s actions are a significant undercount. A statistical analysis published in the Lancet found deaths from traumatic injury to be under-represented by 41%. The non-traumatic deaths caused by genocide-related exposure, malnutrition, lack of hygiene and lack of access to healthcare. The staggering loss in life expectancy (which far exceeds the dramatic drops in post-Soviet Russia and those in Iraq under sanctions and under occupation) suggest a holocaust of dimensions that we have not yet begun to grasp. It is worth bearing in mind that the legal definition of genocide itself specifies not just direct killing, but also “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Is it just human nature that people who die the slow agonising deaths of starvation or preventable cancer are not as newsworthy as those who die of faster acts of violence? If so it still does not explain why violent deaths in Australia warrant so much more attention than the violent deaths of Palestinians. Some of those Palestinian deaths have been shocking, dramatic and eminently newsworthy. Drones have become sci-fi death machines, flying into buildings including a hospitals and dishing out death. If a remote-controlled flying death machine hunts down a fleeing grandmother and ends the terrified woman’s life in a hail of gunfire, how can this not be considered news? Where in the world has anything like this ever happened before?
What of the horrors of high explosive deaths that leave behind fractional corpses such as half a child hanging from a shattered building. Reducing whole people to gobbets of meat and bone that must be gathered by survivors into sacks, filled only to approximate a person by rough weight. Is that not newsworthy?
Prominent people like Refaat al-Areer and Anas al-Sharif are marked for death and we could watch helplessly as they spent their last days before the inevitable. Is that not newsworthy? Does that lack human interest?
News managers like to cite “proximity” as a reason for differential reporting that effectively assigns vastly more value to the lives of some people than others. There is a commonsense argument made that people care more about people who are akin to them, but aside from those cases where the audience might credibly have a personal connection, they are not reflecting but rather creating an in-group, an “us” based on Western chauvinism. The media ensure that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They use sentimentality and emotive copy, visuals, and sounds to create a sense of emotional connection.
As demographic changes take hold in “Western” countries the obsession with other “Western” countries that might be on the other side of the world begins to look more and more like naked racism. As with many other of our racist institutions the events of the Gaza Holocaust have acted to further tear the veil and show us the ugly reality beneath.
When Israel attacked Iran and killed many innocent Iranians, Iran retaliated, killing some 27 Israeli civilians whose deaths received far more coverage than the nearly 500 Iranian civilians who died because of Israel’s attack. Israel claims its attacks were justified by Iran being a threat, an irrelevant claim made in some form by all aggressors. Legally there is no case to me made for pre-emption because under the UN Charter Israel must seek a UN-brokered solution or a UN authorisation to use force. There is no credible argument to be made that they were exercising the right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That means that Israel is the aggressor by definition and yet we treat those killed in Israel as the real victims while those killed by the aggressor are barely a footnote.
Iran and Israel are in the same region. Western countries have many more Persian/Iranian residents than Israeli and somewhat more Palestinians than Israelis. Australia, for example had at the 2021 census 11,035 Israelis, 15,607 Palestinians, and 81,119 Iranians. The US had 191,000 Israelis at the 2020 census, an estimated 160,000 Palestinians in 2023, and 568,564 Iranians in the 2020 census. In the UK according to the 2021 census there were 114,432 Iranians, an estimated 60,000 Palestinians in 2017, and the latest figure for Israel born residents was 11,892 in the 2001 census. (Obviously these are hard to compare, but they fit a similar pattern).
Clearly there is no argument to be made that Western countries have more personal links to Israelis than to Palestinians and less so Iranians. The bias then, could perhaps be ascribed to a cultural affiliation, but does that really hold water?
A lot of effort goes into integrating Israel as a civilisationally “Western” country, but what does that actually mean? Israel is a deeply peculiar country by any standards and the ways in which it demonstrably differs from all other “Western” countries are numerous and significant. It doesn’t define itself as a legitimate nation-state in that it officially denies the existence of an Israeli nationality. It won’t define its borders either. It is partly theocratic, particularly with regard to family law. It is linguistically and ethnically distinguished by not speaking a European language and having a majority of its population of Arab descent when counting both Palestinian citizens of Israel and those “Mizrahim” whose ancestry is predominantly Arab (not to mention those many Palestinian subjects in territories that Israel has occupied and is settling).
Does Israel have special “Western values” and for that matter does Australia or any “Western” country? The Christchurch terrorist believed that there was a shared Western identity and that belief seems to be a core part of what made him such a vile cunt. For that reason alone we ought to at least interrogate this notion rather than gulping the Kool-Aid with such lip-smacking fervour.
There are actually no concrete measurable factors tying Western countries together that do not equally include countries not considered to be Western. From religion to religiosity, from gender disparity to wealth disparity, from economic production to political culture. Aotearoa, for example, is measurably more akin to Uruguay and Mongolia in economic and social measures. Our ties to Australia and the UK are equalled by our ties to Pacific Island nations and our economic and demographic ties to China outweigh our ties to the US.
People tend to ascribe Western-ness to one of two things – Christianity (or its modern political guise as “Judeo-Christianity”) or Western philosophy. We can quickly dismiss the former as Christian countries aren’t considered Western if they have the wrong skin colour. The second comes from artificially separating classical Greek philosophy from Persian and Indian, ignoring the Islamic origins of medieval European philosophy, and likewise ignoring the Chinese, Indian, Arabic, African, American, and generally global inspirations of modern European philosophy. As David Wengrow and David Graeber show in The Dawn of Everything (2021) the enlightenment was akin to the industrial revolution in that it was reliant entirely on synthesising raw materials gathered in far-flung conquests. There is a large question mark over the claim that the resulting “values” should rightly be called Western if one considers both the non-Western antecedents and the contemporaneous adoption of the same values in other parts of the world.
The key Western value always cited is “liberalism” – a very loaded term in itself. The histories of European and, indeed, US imperialism show that such “liberalism” as may exist in the imperial centre tends not to follow the troops and tax-collectors into the periphery. While the Atlee government in the UK was cementing the NHS and building social housing in the UK, British judges in Kenya were sending men in numbers previously unknown to the British Empire to die the cruel death of hanging. At the exact period that abolitionists were making inroads leading to the last execution in the UK, 1090 were hanged in Kenya.
The very notions of civilisation that Westerners claim to embody seem to act psychologically as a multiplier for savagery. After creating a fiction of the innate brutality of their intended victims they unleash violence and cruelty that is beyond all but the most warlike of their enemies. In Yemen, Kenya, the Philippines, El Salvador, Haiti, Panama, Algeria, Indochina, Angola, Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Lebanon and Nicaragua (to name but a portion) one could argue that the “liberalism” of the torturer and executioner seemed a lot more like fascism.
One does not need to deny the unprecedented speed and scale of the genocidal slaughter of Poles, Russians, Jews and more by the German-led Axis powers to agree with Aimé Césaire’s observation that the underlying ideology was not novel except in its application to Europeans:
…[T]hey hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
King Leopold’s Congo notwithstanding, it does bear repeating that there were both quantitative and qualitative differences that distinguished the slaughter unleashed by Germany in Europe. Yet, at the same time, we should also be clear that the Nazi imperial project was modelled directly on European imperial practices elsewhere, not least of which was the genocidal Westward expansion of the United States of America.
A more obvious but equally fundamental point is that fascism was itself a product of Western civilisation. I would argue that it is a product of Western liberalism, moreover a feature not a bug. In this age of fascist renaissance it seems increasingly apparent that fascism and liberalism can coexist, and indeed always have.
Even at its most fundamental semantic level and historical usage liberalism is not liberatory, but rather betokens the largesse of the powerful. That is the literal definition of the word “liberal”. Beyond the theatrics, fascism simply functions as the tacit stick that always accompanies that carrot. Liberal polities bring the stick out whenever they succumb to their own impulse to eat the carrot leaving them with nothing to offer the masses.
One could argue that fascism is a Western value. It is a Western invention after all. One can also make the case for the key Western value being a proclivity for genocide. That certainly does unite Australia with Israel, but what of Iceland or Ireland? Are they particularly genocidal? And what of Japan’s activities during World War II? Empires and genocide are not exclusively Western because nothing is exclusively Western. Arguing for negative “Western values” is no more valid than arguing that there is an innate Western liberal benevolence.
I can also make a much briefer point about what “Western” means by reference to skin colour. Western countries are those with a lot of people descended primarily from Europeans and it is not much of a secret that those who think migration threatens “Western values” refer exclusive to people with darker skin on average. It is not, however, simply about the majority population. South Africa was a Western country when I was a child and now it is not. So a “Western” country is, beneath all of the flim-flam, code for a country run by white people (except if it is Russia). In that sense Israel does broadly qualify as the Ashkenazi population have disproportionate economic and political power.
So the notion that we are more proximate to other Western countries is a pretence to cover a form of unmentionable bigotry. I have been using Israel as an example but it differs somewhat because in Israel’s case “Western values” are mere camouflage for racially-informed politics, whereas with the case of countries like white-majority Australia “western values” are camouflage for politically-informed racism.
Our vast hypocrisy with regard to the suffering of Palestinians is ultimately about racism pure and simple. Obviously here in Aotearoa there is a level of connection with Sydney. There were around 85,500 New Zealand born people in Sydney at the 2021 census, not a huge number but still considerable for a country of this population (around 0.16% of Aotearoa’s own population at the time). A lot of people from here have visited Sydney. It is close by our isolated standards at a mere 2225km. We, in short, do have some connection, though not as close geographically or otherwise as people from elsewhere might imagine. For other “Western” countries, though, it is very far. How much does a rural Norwegian, for example, really have in common with someone from Sydney.
The idea of Western cultural affinity is a pretty poor disguise for clear racism, but the racism itself is perhaps equally confected. There has always been a tension in the Western discourse of Western-ness between the marker of skin colour and markers of national affinity; or class/social status; or anticommunist political ideology/love of the USA and baseball/consumerist addiction to Mickey Mouse and coca-cola (as seen respectively in French, British, and US cinema). This allows the hegemonic group to code non-whites selectively as “good” examples or leave them uncoded as the suspect other. Thus in the US we have had “good Indians” and various other types that can be divided into “good foreigners” and “good immigrants”. Thus those in the liberal arm of western libfascism can engage in a thoroughly racist act of scrutiny and judgement while convincing themselves that the very act proves them to be non-racist. (As I have mentioned it is in the essence of liberalism to bestow generously from a position of tightly held power).
There is always diversity in a culture of racism. Even among Nazis there were those, notably Otto Wächter and Adolf Eichmann, who claimed to be essentially innocent of the blood of the tens or hundreds of thousands they had been instrumental in murdering due to not having any personal animus. Evidently one could rise to the top ranks of the Nazi death-machinery without being a real racist, so we should be very discerning in how we view racism in a wider Western context. The inconsistency and fluidity of this two-faced racism is a source of great strength because it allows racial violence to function in the face of factual contradictions.
Western racism is not a science, it is a vibe. The inconclusive fluidity between unstated racism and stated but inchoate and often contradictory cultural claims is the escape hatch for anyone cornered by probing enquiry. The existence of exceptions is used in the same way that politicians might seek to deflect accusations of racism by citing their marriage to an Asian or a Samoan, and should be treated with the same contempt.
The racism of those who think that they aren’t racist is far more powerful than overt racism. It is the unseen ocean in which we swim. It is the odourless tasteless poison in the sweet tangy drink of Western self-satisfaction. There is a cloud of whiteness that covers Western diversity and it is there for one reason and one reason only: to create a Them who stand outside of this miasma of caucasity.
The rise of overt racism and fascism we are seeing seems in large part a reaction to the weakening of the assumed norm of Western whiteness. The winds of demographic change are threatening to disperse the cloud of whiteness. Like Trump’s more brazen and unapologetic imperialism with regard to Venezuela and Greenland, the growth in overt racism seems like a slide towards a de facto apartheid system. In most Western countries this manifests as anti-immigrant actions, but here in Aotearoa it is paralleled revealingly by actions against Māori political power and cohesiveness. Of course it is probably all just a coincidence that people linked to the same international think-tanks are pushing policies that suppress non-white people using completely different excuses in different countries. (While Atlas-linked politicians do have a strong tendency to fair skin, we should never neglect to consider their Asian wives or Samoan husbands or how well they get on with taxi drivers, all of which prove non-racist intent).
All of this is in the service of power. The notion of whiteness was invented to serve elite power through subdividing subjects in a manner of aggravating the existing oppressive power of slavery and empire. This worked to separate indelibly the poor Europeans from the African chattel slaves with whom they had sometimes begun to make common cause. In the US they made a system where intermarriage was banned, as was the legitimisation of children born to mixed parents. They created circumstances where maintaining slaves was made far easier and more affordable by an easily seen and roughly reliable distinction in skin tone. In the British and French empires when dealing with both transported slaves and with indigenous majorities, it became very important to separate relatively small numbers of Europeans from a majority population. Apartheid rules and norms were put in place. In India, for example, white men of any status, however lowly, were rapidly elevated above Indians of any status, however exalted. White women were shipped out to prevent intermarriage which had been shown to lead to disloyalty to the East India Company and the British Crown.
Racism is never as black-and-white as its exponents might like. As I have explained its inconsistency is a source of strength, but it is also a weakness. There is a clear failure in the US of the system of racism that once led white liberals to be, in the estimation of both Malcolm X and King, the greatest obstacle to the civil rights movement. Now there is broad solidarity with causes like Black Lives Matter and opposition to ICE raids. Of course that does not change elite politics at all. The telling reason is that there are still limits to liberal solidarity. Because “centre-left” types won’t stand with Palestine they not only become a key component in the most explicit and documented genocide in human history, they also pave the path for the electoral victory of the people they claim to oppose. Their willingness to be morally inconsistent is an inch that they give the libfascists – a massive inch that becomes a world-spanning mile. Their selective amorality leads them to be lead by the purely immoral. They vote for people who are indistinguishable from the other party in almost every aspect apart from branding, and what they get for it is a constant slide into inequality and fascism punctuated by empty promises and failed initiatives.
You can see, though, that people are starting to understand that compromise is no longer possible. We literally harm ourselves when we refuse to stand up for others. There is a complex relationship between this political reaction to increasingly undemocratic politics and the increasing visibility of those who were previously kept distant and alien by technology and culture. Our human commonality may be less discussed than in the 1970s, but it is more widely felt. We are quite simply far more exposed to human diversity both remotely and in person. The baseline of non-elite culture is far less racist than it was.
People are callous to the suffering of Palestinians and to the loss of Venezuelans, but it is clearly a constant work of great energy to keep them that way. A lot of people, for example, have some trust in Al Jazeera English because they have kept the humanity of Palestinians central to the reporting of events. For this reason it is all the easier to see their devaluation of Venezuelan life. Or at least it is so if you aren’t a loyalist seeking confirmation of your bias, or rather avoiding the grim fact that there are no reliable major news sources at all.
In many hours of watching their reportage over events in Venezuela I saw an iron discipline exercised to exclude inconvenient assertions or questions. In the innumerable mentions I saw of the terrible state of the Venezuelan economy not when mention or question was raised on the role of US sanctions in creating that situation. Even when Trump and Rubio made direct reference to oil underproduction they gave no context of the impacts of US sanctions on oil production. They didn’t even bring up the recent dramatic US theft of Venezuelan oil from a tanker. I saw several Venezuelan commentators and correspondents all of whom seemed in favour of the intervention. Not one was ever challenged with the most obvious questions about how they justify supporting a foreign power invading their country and killing their compatriots.
The first post-invasion edition of the panel show “Inside Story” featured informed critics of the US crime, but in general the reportage had been dire. AJE has done everything possible to make US claims seem credible when they clearly aren’t. The authoritarian nature of the Venezuelan government was treated as a topic of great interest deserving considerable attention when it clearly has nothing to do with US motives except as a transparently false pretext. The US has a long history of supporting and often installing viciously repressive regimes and is no slouch itself when it comes to killing and torturing people in various parts of the world. If political violence was the issue then one might ask why the US doesn’t start with a simpler exercise such as, say, not flying people to a torture camp in El Salvador.
After featuring several experts in international law who have been unequivocal in how clearly illegal US acts have been AJE has joined other media outlets in choosing to give considerable emphasis to the de facto impunity in a manner that conflates the subject. A correspondent directly referred to the Monroe Doctrine as being an argument in international law when by nature it is an argument against international law.
AJE has worked hard to distort the story, and not for direct self-interest as they are may lose viewers with such coverage. The point is not to convince you that Trump is right, it is to distract you from the alarming and infuriating realities. It is to dull your understanding of the naked imperialist politics by making it seem partisan and contingent. It is to make you think that there are two sides to the story. And above all, it is to make you think that the people killed aren’t really the point. The human part of the story is not interesting. The reporting is very different when the politics are different.
AJE covers Gaza with attention to the ground truth as experienced by the people, yet the initial reportage in this instance seemed very unconcerned about the death and destruction caused, yet pretty breathlessly excited about the glimpses of Maduro and Cilia Flores as they were transported to and around New York. I can only imagine how much worse this has been on other media outlets, because I can’t bear to watch any.
In the early 2000s a celebrated study showed the more people watched Fox News the less they knew about current events. My reaction at the time was to reflect that I could easily design a questionnaire to show the same phenomenon among viewers of BBC World. This made me a heretic by the standards of the time, but as much as we still need large media organisations we have to recognise that they are all irredeemably fucked. Al Jazeera is sacrosanct to some, but ultimately it is a large organisation devoted to serving political power and capital. It is Reactionary Except for Palestine.
Media organisations are no different to political parties in that they use selective moralism to destroy actual morality. In doing so they trick consumers into working against themselves by abandoning their solidarity with others. Like every confidence trick the bait on the hook is an appeal to selfishness. Wealth and security and status will come with the natural elevation in the pecking that comes from the debasement and suppression of someone identified by characteristics we do not ourselves possess. The leopards campaign by saying that when you give them the power to eat faces they will only use it for the good of humanity, so why worry? More than that, wouldn’t you be safer if some people’s faces were eaten?
The news media are a tool of oppression, but one that must gain your trust and your consent to be oppressed. They maintain trust by adjusting to key concerns that are of particular interest to the masses, while being very liberal with the truth regarding all of the other matters of concern to ruling interests.
The clearest and best studied example of the news media’s function at fighting rearguard actions against popular discontent comes from the US after the 1968 Tet Offensive in Viet Nam. The popular is that the wise men of the media lost faith with the war effort and thus conveyed discontent to the gormless masses, who are incapable of learning anything that they are not told by the media. In reality they were responding to a level of irrepressible dissent. People had already turned against the war in Viet Nam. A large part of this was due to work of activists in innumerable areas spreading information, though it was also fuelled by the fact that the line promulgated by the media was contradicted by events and, not infrequently, the images and footage that accompanied the official lies.
It is also untrue that after 1968 the mainstream media became oppositional to the government. Daniel Hallin was the leading scholar of this issue and what he found was that the news media effectively became a mirror of the consumer’s own views, allowing them to read confirmation and project common sentiment onto the media source. Doves and hawks both believed that the major networks shared their views.
This was not just a release valve for dissent and discontent, it became a way of corralling and controlling antiwar sentiment. The country was shaking with rebelliousness that crossed and melded different issues. What we see now (and I suspect it began back then) is that the preference is to represent issues as atomised and unconnected. News media like to find spokespeople who represent and issue in total isolation and those people should embody respectable conformity in all other aspects. For example, if you want a guest discuss poverty then the ideal person is one who runs a soup kitchen for an NGO that prohibits its staff to talk about government policy. This process is one of depoliticising politics, while politics itself becomes purely and issue of parties and leaders. Strong antiwar feelings were supplanted by strong anti-Nixon feelings. Liberalism is resurgent.
A massive part of the domestication of the antiwar movement was the destruction of universality, spearheaded by the a push to devalue the lives of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. The initial thrust of antiwar sentiment was dominated by ideas of an unjust, brutal and inhumane slaughter. This was often explicitly anti-imperialist and there was an increasing amount of support for the Communist-led National Liberation Front and for the government of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.
While Nixon made a fictional pro-war “silent majority”, the news media created an equally fictitious silent antiwar majority. While everyone protesting the war made it clear that they hated what their country was doing to the people of Indochina, the mainstream media knew by instinct that that could not be why ordinary people opposed the war. For them, by definition, ordinary people are intellectually and morally coarse. They aren’t educated liberals, they are racists. Beer-swilling Joe Lunchbox thinks Chinese food is suspect, so by clear inference cannot possibly care about the deaths of people we don’t care about. They care about the body-bags with our boys dying for a lost cause trying to save the feckless gooks from their own Asiatic tendencies. They effectively made themselves the victims of their own acts of genocide.
The infectiousness of this way of discussing the issue derives from the fact that is linked to pieties of patriotism. Anyone who does not centre the suffering of US personnel is suspect and could be subject to being attacked and humiliated into performing an auto-da-fé. The body bags trope, which seems very crude when one has the context, was repeated ad nauseam in all forms of media, including fiction.
The more subtle form of differentially humanising the victims of US aggression was to always forefront the number of US personnel killed. The sombre Vietnam Veterans Memorial annoyed militarists who wanted a celebration of glory, but it serves perfectly to imprint the notion of US victimhood and focus attention on that imposing list of names and the loss that is entailed. It became the norm to talk of the cost of the war as being “58,000 US lives”. After a while of this cliché some of the more adventurous sorts began adding the millions of Vietnamese dead as a very literal afterthought.
It actually took a long time for the constant repetition of this vulgar tribalism to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Polls showed the belief that the US involvement in Viet Nam was a criminal aggression in nature reached a peak in the 1990s. The liberal “antiwar” discourse has become relentless apologism which suggests that the US government made a tragic miscalculation when trying (out of either noble or acquisitive motives) to bring free-market democracy to a lesser country. In this telling they were sucked into a strategic quagmire. The facts are that the US expended enormous resources and extreme urgency (especially from 1965 to 1968) to send a total of 3.4 million personnel. Politicians made the expected protestations of reluctance, but so did Hitler. The rush to full-scale commitment from 1965 was unmistakeable fervid. It was an aggression and a war of choice.
Racism, though, always proves an indispensable tool for those who seek to recast the crimes of the West as unintentional and out-of-character lapses in the norms of Western civility. In the liberal telling the quagmire was also the heart of darkness. The exposure to the savagery of the Vietnamese destroyed the moral fibre of our great young men and made some of them into raping, murdering, body-part-collecting madmen. Once again the people who flew thousands of miles to massacre people turn out to be the victims.
[Please note that I am not denying that most of these people are legitimately victims of US government. The median age of US personnel killed was 21. I am denying that their victimhood should be anything more than a footnote.]
The empire’s propagandists – both the hordes of ideologues who do it for free and the very numerous and well-resourced communications professionals whose significance is routinely glossed over – use sentiment against fact. Too much factuality, even if distorted, invites ordinary people to conduct their own private thought experiments and they will end up siding against empire. For example, the public were subjected to extremely emotive reporting about October 7 2023, including false but crucial claims of mass rape and 40 beheaded babies. The purpose is to cloud their reasoning, otherwise the claim that Israel could respond with violence because “Israel has a right to defend itself” might lead them to ask themselves: “don’t Palestinians also have a right to defend themselves?” That opens up a whole can of worms that ultimately leads to the fact that Palestinians have the legal right to carry out attacks inside Israel, but Israel does not have the legal right to attack Palestinians while it remains the occupier under international law.
Part of the fascistic nature of modern imperialism is the high level of appeal to sentiment. It is a self-sustaining system that uses differential humanisation to create a higher level of sentiment about Western/global North lives, which then justifies more attention and response, which then feeds the racially-informed differential humanisation. And around it goes.
New South Wales is now making a regular habit of deploying a large number of assault-rifle-toting, black-uniformed, masked police to the streets of Sydney when crowds are in the streets. It is the sense of gravity that makes it seem like a sane response. How is protecting large general crowds even related to an attack on a smaller crowd specifically targetted for their Jewish faith? If they are concerned that the attack was not isolated then it is Jews specifically that need protection. Even if they felt, for some undefined reason, that “terrorism” in a completely general and amorphous sense is now more of a “risk”, their response is hard to justify. Terrorists have the attacker’s advantage, and if you should deter a given attack with an armed police presence they will just choose another occasion. The best response to freelance political violence is to isolate the would-be perpetrators ideologically, politically and socially.
People used to know what heavily-armed masked government forces in the streets meant. It meant political repression. Nowadays, of course it is normalised because it happens in the USA, therefore it has to be inevitable. NSW’s little step further towards police-statehood happened through the shock effect (as described by Naomi Klein) bypassing the collective faculties of reason. It works because of the sense that something unprecedented has happened which thus justifies urgent equally unprecedented reactions.
The Bondi beach attack was not really as unprecedented as protrayed. In fact it is less than two years since a mass-murder happened in that very neighbourhood. Commentators (including even Antony Loewenstein) were in unconscious lockstep in their emphasis on the unAustralian-ness of it all. In this telling there was a massacre in Port Arthur 30 years ago leading to gun law reform which made such events unthinkable until the attack of 14 December 2025. I saw no mention of the Bondi Tower Junction massacre of 13 April 2024. Nor did I see anyone bring up the fact that the deadliest such attack on religious congregants was carried out by an Australian from New South Wales who had originally intended to attack Muslims in Australia. In other circumstance that massacre could easily have occurred in Australia. It seems almost baffling to ignore the relevance of each of these two events, one so close in time and space, the other only a little less recent and also linked to Australia and arguably the most significant previous attack of this kind anywhere in the world.
The Bondi beach attacks have brought more changes than just a scary policing. Gun laws are again being reformed. Hate speech laws are being strengthened. Visas are being restricted for “antisemitism”, which in practice includes pro-Palestine advocacy. NSW plans to designate “globalise the intifada” as hate speech. Antisemitism and holocaust education is being extended in schools.
There is quite a contrast with the Bondi Tower Junction attacks in which a white Christian man targeted women. There was no crackdown on misogynist speech or the sort of online activity that promotes violence against women. While the attack wasn’t as deadly it was still an international story complete with dramatic footage of two French men using bollards to thwart and fend off the murderer. This led to an international misinformation explosion that primarily misidentified the perpetrator as a Muslim. Zionist Rachel Riley went so far as to post: “For six months now people have been out our streets proudly calling for ‘Intifada Revolution’. If you want to know what ‘Globalise the Intifada’ looks like see the Sydney mall.”
Speaking of racism and Islamophobia, one of the French bollard-wielders was given residency in gratitude for his action, but a Pakistani who was wounded protecting others had to point out the double-standard before being given the same offer. Equally telling was the fact that the Bondi beach murderers were misreported as being Pakistani and Syrian, but there was no equal emphasis given to the fact that one was Indian. Evidently being Pakistani or Syrian is newsworthy for some reason, but being Indian is not.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the suffering of those hurt or killed on Bondi beach, nor the grief of those who lost loved ones. Yet there is a clear political agenda to elevate our sense of personal connection, to elevate our sense of the scale of the violence, and imbue the event with a singular significance. This model has been used over and over with regard to attacks carried out by Muslims, but is far less evident in other massacres. The Las Vegas massacre of 2017 led to a ban on “bump stocks” but even that was overturned. It all seems natural because of the self fulfilling prophecy of whose lives are valued and what threats to those lives we must take most seriously.
There is the question of the effect on the sense of security of Jews in Australia. This is real, though statistically the immediate threat remains negligible. Compare that, though, with the more solid and inescapable reasons for fear amongst Palestinians living in Gaza. Every day is a massacre and the survivors know that the next day will be a massacre too. They have all lost loved ones – not some. They have all suffered personal hardship – not some.
There is a creepy sense in which many seem to have internalised the differential humanisation of our institutions to the point where it seems to feel to them that people in Gaza feel pain less, grieve less, and fear death less. There is an implicit calculus as if they have in mind an unspoken fraction, a percentage of a full human life that each individual from Gaza possesses. A percentage of a human’s worth, and with that a percentage of a human’s capacity for emotion. When challenged with intended irony the “exchange rate” of Palestinian lives that Israel could rightfully take in response to their own losses on October 7, Piers Morgan actually gave it very serious consideration, concluding in his most pompous tones that he could not possibly make that determination as a mere bystander and implying that Israel must choose and should, in doing so, avoid disproportionate excess.
Morgan’s logic of exchanging death for death is sick enough in itself, but he clearly intended that Palestinian lives would count less mathematically than Israeli lives. Although this exchange was very early in the Gaza Holocaust, Israel had already killed thousands. Morgan also said that October 7 was by far the worst event in the “conflict” (i.e. the Palestine Genocide) even though it was less deadly than Israel’s 2008 attack on Gaza and its 2014 attack on Gaza. Eventually Morgan would decide that even as a bystander he had to say that Israel had gone too far. By the timing of this editorial change we can infer that Morgan feels that a Palestinian is worth about 1/50th of an Israeli life. We live in such a fucked-up world that he then peddles this as evidence that he is unbiased because there are limits to his support of Israel’s supposed right to defend itself (against the people it is constantly oppressing and frequently killing). I wonder how many Israelis Morgan thinks can be killed now that he understands that Israel’s actions are an atrocity.
When some people are attacked we are meant to feel that they are us. Others are meant to remain a distant concern. One provokes instant reflex and the other is grounds for pontification and prevarication. This has been naturalised through a racially-informed sense of collective identity – the cloud of whiteness (that can also cover the good non-white people when needed). This arose for specific reasons and serves a purpose. It is the default sentiment that makes Western hegemony seem fitting and unremarkable in international affairs. It is also the prime tool by which we are manipulated into supporting irrational, unjust, hypocritical and fascistic acts in our name by our governments.
Genocide is the life blood of empire; the theft of wealth, labour, and resources is the muscle and sinew; but the skeleton is built from bones of racism. Without it nothing has direction. Without it there is no shape to the skin. The skin? That fucking teflon coating. No matter how bald-faced the rapacity, no matter how enormous the injustice, no matter how large the death toll, we judge the US empire by the glamorous non-stick neon sheen of its civilised liberal-democratically-normed skin. That skin would collapse into slug-like grotesquerie if it were not given shape by racist double standards.
It is perhaps the most important functional aspect of racism to convince people that demonstrably terrible things done to some people aren’t really that bad and don’t really matter in a fundamental way. They may be regretted, but they are not cause for change. Some people don’t count. If people start thinking of them as fully human then the international structure of empire will come under threat by the solidarity of the public in the imperial centre.
In the near future of technological dystopian social holocaust that the tech billionaires want to create this may cease to matter, but at the moment it is crucial that people in the West do not start seeing Palestinians or Panamanians or Nigerians as fully human. This may actually be the real reason behind the pivot to serious anti-immigrant policies. Immigrants are economically crucial and highly profitable, but it has long served the interests of capital to socially marginalise them as a way of putting downward pressure on wages.
With a growing sense of diversity and acceptance becoming a key feature in Western neighbourhoods (including small towns) it is clear that there is an imperative not to drive the immigrants out (which would be very costly) so much as drive them under. The hopeful, and yet scary, part is that in the US they cannot do this while wearing the mask of liberalism and must show the fascist side. Time will tell what happens in other countries.
There are two aspects to imperial racism, qualitative and quantitative. I have been writing about the qualitative aspect, the sense of distance that dulls our ability to feel compassion for some people – people who seem alien cyphers to us. People for whom compassion is wasted because their suffering is inevitable. Their deaths save other lives and they are the prices for a better world, besides which their lives are already full of suffering. They can never have the things that make life bearable – the tesla, the jacuzzi, the beach resort holidays, the cocaine – so perhaps being bombed is a mercy. The Western news media will never give blow-by-blow accounts of their death agonies, so Westerners are left with their wilful self-delusion that our freedom bombs extinguish life as Godly fingers snuffing the candle flame of mortality. Bad killing is when mean people do the killing. Those mean people are the racial other and if our boys ever start being mean it is purely because they are infected by contagious savagery.
The quantitative element is also absolutely crucial here, and I must at least mention it for context. It is not distinct from the qualitative racism I discuss. In fact it is part of differential humanisation: the heuristic part. The sense that non-Western life is worth less causes people to keep seeking the minimum numerical amount of death that can be ascribed. They are also incredibly vehement about those who might, say, claim that a certain number have died when they can’t provide the exact name, address, shoe size and favourite colour of the alleged dead people as attested by authoritative Western sources such as the CIA, the BBC, or Joe Rogan. This is an entire topic in itself, but before concluding I wanted to ensure that people know that what I am talking about is not separate from the production of factual claims that support the sentimental racism which I am discussing here.
Our recourse against differential humanisation is to embrace universality and the fundamental moral principle of the Golden Rule. Western imperialism is an ideology (a fascistic ideology) that creates “facts” to fit the emotions produced by chauvinistic self-love and the accompanying sense of the inferiority of others. We must instead have a massive prejudice against violence. Those who suffer and die can never be seen a byproducts, collateral damage, or mere spear-carriers who “knew the risks”.
It is no coincidence that our culture has become increasingly anti-intellectual, that the humanities are being starved out of our education systems. Our growing sense that philosophical coherence is a mythical creature chased by privileged dreamers comes from a necessary need to prevent people from understanding the world they live in. Solidarity is enlightened self-interest, and that threatens the empire. So the answer is to stand up for others, to never have the arrogance to believe that the West can tell them how to run their lives, and to never tolerate harm being done in your name.
On Genocide 