Part 1. Recent History.

In the last one hundred plus years there have been many crimes against humanity (civilians targeted and collective punishments) perpetrated on an extremely large scale. However, only five instances of them have been conducted on a massive scale and only two in the presence of a global mass media. The two, World, Wars (1914-18 and 1939-45), the Bosnian War (1992-95), the War on Iraq (2003-2011) and the war on Gaza (2023) are the five. However, the two which have been conducted with the full knowledge of the entire world, have been Bosnia-Herzegovina in former Yugoslavia and Gaza, in former Palestine. Nevertheless, hieghtened media attention was not all the two had in common, for although both sides of the conflict perpetrated crimes against humanity, the two communities which suffered most from such crimes were mainly Muslims. In contrast, the main perpetrators of those crimes against humanity were motivated by two groups of non-Muslim elites (Serbs and Israeli’s,) neither of whom who were prepared to share their land with Muslims. The irony in 2023 is that the latest crimes against humanity in Gaza are being systematically committed by a section of the Jewish community whose ancestors suffered from a systematic attempt to destroy them a generation ago.

All of the above wars were characterised by bitter fighting, indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns along with ethnic cleansing of many indigenous peoples. Even then this was nothing new. It was also the case for many previous generations of Native Indians, African tribal peoples, and Aboriginal communities before them. Indeed, in the Bosnian war, many Bosnian Muslims and Croats were also forced to flee their homes or were expelled by Serbian Armed forces. Historically, such dispossession processes have invariably entailed intimidation, forced expulsion, or killing of the unwanted ethnic groups as well as the destruction of the places of worship, cemeteries and cultural and historical buildings of these targeted groups. The parallels between modern and ancient and instances of annexations and dispossession are just too obvious to miss. The background ideological theme to most of these conflicts perpetrated by the European and North American elites and their armed forces, has been the thinly veiled racism of defending and promoting western “civilization’ and protecting it from ‘barbarism’. Indeed, Civilisation versus Barbarism, is exactly how Netanyahu of Israel phrased it at his October 30, 2023 news conference.

Currently, the lesson being ruthlessly hammered home to Hamas and the Palestinian people, by Israeli and Western ‘civilisation’ is one with a much wider application than Gaza. Just like the lessons addressed to state actors by Allied fire-bombing of German civilians at Dresden and Atomic bombing of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 20th century, the systematic obliteration of Gaza, by American-British-French-backed Israel, is a global message. It is addressed to the entire people of the current Middle East as well as to the elites of Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, China and elsewhere. The message is; ‘We are armed and dangerous’ ‘Do not seriously mess with the leaders of Western Civilisation, for if you do all kinds of mechanized and technical hell with be brought down upon you.
I suggest the following observation was true, during and after all these Wars to establish Anglo-Saxon elite global domination of the world economy, and it still is now. That anyone who could only be moved emotionally by the losses of life on one side of the conflict and not the other had clearly had their humanity severely distorted or completely inverted.

Nonetheless, the popular feeling at the end of the two six year long world war periods of savage and calculated destruction in 1945, was overwhelmingly expressed as – never again! The elite suvivors of that war may have privately thought differently but could hardly ignore this almost universal human sentiment so they decided that in future, countries and people would be represented by a United Nations organisation. At the theoretical level, that organisation would be dedicated to the task of spreading and assisting in the establishment and maintenance of peace and equality among the all the members and nations of the human family. In essence it was an abstract dialogue of rhetoric serving to camouflage reality. In reality, moreover, the organisation was constructed so as to allow the most powerful leaders of western civilisation to do practically anything they liked in the present or future. Hence, crimes against humanity continue whilst the UN Assembly continues to comfortably sit, talk and eat; sit, talk and eat; sit, talk and eat and then dole out bandages and basic foodstuff to the endless disposessed, dispersed and degraded victims of the western civilised system of hierachical mass societies.

I further suggest in 2023, that anyone who can only be moved by the losses of life on one or other side of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, have also clearly had their humanity distorted or impaired. Such a reaction among some people demonstrates that they do not value human life in general, only their own particular family, religious or national identity. Similarly, anyone who can only accept and justify the anger of one side and not the other side have also lost their intellectual integrity, for in this case they have not accurately traced the long chain of cause and effect dating back to 1948 and before. It was in 1948 that the Zionist inspired armed conquest of Palestinian land, homes and economic infrastructure (the first Nakba), began. And before 1948 the Jewish people had suffered from an extreme anti-semitism orchestrated by European elites in general and in particular, the Nazi elite in 1930s Gemany. This suffering included the mass displacement and killing of Jews within Euope. But of course the problem highlighted by the current struggle in Palestine goes much deeper than even the first and second world wars. The underlying motivation behind the Zionist project of conquest begining in 1948 and the Palestinian Resistance to it since, still rests on two insufficiently considered ancient practical and ideological constructs.

Ancient and Modern History.

The first construct was that the best practical way of organising human societies was in the form of a land-occupying and social controlling hierarchical mass society, within the confines of a city, a country or a nation. This model of living began in the near east, some five or six thousand years ago as evidenced by the histories of Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome, before they were later transplanted throughout Europe and then beyond. The second construct developed during that ancient period of hierarchical mass society building was the idea that the existence and purpose of life on earth – in all its human and animal forms – was the creation of an invisible, all powerful, male superhuman being called God. The more realistic idea that life on earth was the result of an immensely long evolutionary path from single-celled life-forms to complex multicellular life organisms, was unknown to those ancient peoples.

Those who abandoned hunting and gathering and commenced living within agriculturally based hierarchical mass societies had no inkling of such future discoveries. Instead, the amalgamation and synthesis of these two constructs (hierarchical mass living and one Abrahamic God) produced within the hierarchies of these mass societies an abnormal totalitarian and sectarian mentality. It was a mentality which when their elite rule was threatened in any way, responded by totally destroying the threat and any human personifications of it, whether they exist within or outside of their communities.

It is a matter of historical record that once those two constructs were conjoined together, elites in all hierarchical mass societies began to justify enslaving and killing other human beings either in the name of defending (or expanding) their ‘religion’ or in the name of defending (or expanding) their ‘nations’ territorial control. It should also be recognised that this period is also when distortions, propaganda and direct lies routinely entered into the play book of those with inhumanity and deceit to hide. Whether these elites genuinely believed these religious ideologies or not, then and now, religious ideas were (and are) used by elites to help control their populations for their own private benefit. ‘God save the king and all who rule over us’ in whatever language, was a neat piece of convenient propaganda. From the ancient Mediterranean world, through the Medieval period of Europe, and onto the modern global capital dominated world, that pattern of elite inspired invasion, conquest and annexation, sanctioned by God or his priests, has continued.

It was during the European colonial period, when Africa, Asia, North and South America were colonised, that abnormal sectarian (and by then ‘racist’ characteristic of hierarchical mass society elites) was visited upon the native populations of the whole world. Land annexations and genocidal extinctions of indigenous, North and South American indians, African peoples, Australian aboriginal people, Oceanic Island people and Asian Indian peoples, took place. Entire populations were decimated. Each European colonial power hatched up and implemented it’s own particular final solution to any sustained resistance by indigenous peoples to European conquest and dispossesion. Massacres of villages and towns in foreign places, were often total and various European colonial administrations perpetrated what the author of Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) condensed into the phrase of “exterminate all the brutes“

So in view of this colonial era history and its huge contribution to the ideology and wealth of Europe and its elites, is it really surprising who were the main representatives refusing to join the UN call for a cease fire in the October to November 2023 genocidal blitzkrieg of Gaza? Was it merely coincidence that the elite refusniks were the modern representatives of those European countries elites that initiated the period of colonial annexation and massacre? The historical record of colonisation, is replete with examples of racism in the form of supposedly inferior peoples, being introduced to ‘modernity’ by superior peoples during that period of systematic dispossesion. This racist ideology, metaphorically soaked into the thinking of European elites, and blended together with its class-based ideology, until it eventually saturated the culture and infected the thinking of all other classes. It was an ideology which reasoned that the advanced countries containing the superior peoples should dominate the backward countries containing the inferior peoples. Also that the superior countries elites, when not squabbing among themselves, should help each other to obtain and maintain their economic and financial domination over weaker and less advanced countries.

Consequently, the following question cannot be seriously avoided. Is it not possibly the case that beneath the thin veneer of European and North American humanist pretence for the equality of nations and peoples, that there is still more than a slight indication of the 19th century idea that European elites are not just different, but superior and modern: That non-European peoples are not just different, but inferior and backward, not to be trusted and have an evil intent. Does that fairly recent – and often obliquely, if not openly celebrated – colonial empire building history of Europe not go some way to explain the Israeli, European and North American double standards with regard to the tragic losses of life to Israeli men women and children? Does it not indicate that below all the pretence of a – fair rules based international order – there is a consistent lack of similar level of concern for the even greater number of tragic losses of Palestinian men, women and children, as well as all other ethnicities, not belonging to, or not firmly committed to the western bourgeois interpretation of human progress?

After all the botanical/taxanomical invention of so-called inferior and superior plant and animal species popularised by Linnaeus, Malthus, Galton, Darwin and other ‘educated’ Europeans, was extended to human species (Herbert Spencer) and eagerly accepted by all elites, including the Jewish elite, before it was put on steroids by the Nazis. This fascist Germanic trend which placed themselves, the English, and Nordic peoples at the top of their fabricated list of so-called superior races and placed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and others as inferior races, far below the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples. All that intellectually refined ranking of relatively small human anatomical differences occurred as Europeans were heading up the frantic scramble for Africa and other resource-rich places. On that fascistically constructed scale or superior and inferior peoples, the Arab and African peoples, were placed lower down among the so-called ‘inferior’ ones. In relationship to the indiscriminate bombing and shelling of Gaza it will be worth considering in part 2 of this series, the relatively modern hierarchical elite methods of marginalising the ‘other’ or de-humanising the so-called inferior peoples – as exemplified in particular by the National Socialist elite of the 20th century German Third Reich.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2023)