Marco D’Eramo We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them. We, unbending guardians of Western values, implacable defenders of international law: we dine on mass murder bien chambré . We are deeply pained by the deaths of ‘innocent civilians’, of course, saddened by the hospitals razed to the ground. Our hearts go out to the ragamuffins with no future who assail the few aid trucks that reach the Strip. We are distressed by the number of journalists being slaughtered. But the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in Gaza does not stop us sleeping at night, even as the situation worsens week by week. We supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing. It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. This would be less apparent if the Israeli government and its supporters would simply state outright that Israel has the right...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51