The Fading Illusion of Western Moral Superiority

How Gaza shows us the West's Pretense to Moral Superiority is -- and always was -- a Fraud

Jan 29, 2024

“The final pretense that there exists a "rules-based order" collapsed with the decision of the governments of the US, France, and Germany to excuse a genocide rather than inconvenience an ally.
A mortifying spectacle that not even history will forgive.” - Edward Snowden on X

A 2023 study by Andy Baker and David Cupery surveyed attitudes of people around the world toward their former colonizer. The study, entitled “Animosity, Amnesia, or Admiration? Mass Opinion Around the World Toward the Former Colonizer,” was published in the British Journal of Political Science and furnished some otherwise surprising conclusions. Perhaps the most significant finding was that formerly colonized people tended to hold a favorable opinion of the countries that once colonized them. In fact, the general levels of favorability shown towards the previous colonizer were significantly higher than levels of favorability held for other countries. In this vein, Baker and Cupery observed:

We find that colonial abuses are mostly missing from the global public mind: Former colonizers are not resented as colonizers in world mass opinion. Instead, individuals tend to see their country's former colonial master in a favourable light for two reasons. First, former colonizers tend to have democratic regimes, and individuals tend to value democracies. Second, former metropoles trade disproportionately with their former colonies, and individuals tend to value their country's larger trading partners.

The study, conducted by reviewing attitudes in over ninety countries, pairs well with other surveys showing admiration for western exports by formerly colonized lands, especially its media and technology apparatus. World opinion has elsewhere shown that pluralities support the principles that Western countries have purported as their defining political features, i.e., their commitment to justice, women’s rights, freedom of expression, and human rights including restrictions against abuses and torture.

For many years, this has placed a unique burden on the Global South and developing world more broadly. Often, intellectuals, media figures, and journalists – both inside and outside of these lands – have argued that the distinctive political superiority of the West can be accounted for by way of freedoms. On this reading, the economic and political disempowerment of billions around the world occurs because they lack the requisite freedoms through which they can appreciate the gifts of western modernity. Moreover, the West itself repeatedly invokes its freedoms and commitments to evaluate and condemn other lands, often with severe repercussions for not abiding by the latest iteration of rights en vogue in the West. A 2019 New York Times op-ed argued, for instance, that China needs “freedom of information,” while the US State Department produces annual “freedom” indexes of countries around the world, chronicling in detail their supposed failures to implement western-style freedoms.

Often, these principles serve as a pretext for punishment. Ugandan officials are currently under sanctions via visa restrictions for resisting LGBT normalization. Dozens of countries are currently sanctioned economically, a political tool that disproportionately affects ordinary residents (especially the poor) of targeted countries while having little impact on elites. More damning yet, economic sanctions do little to alter the behavior of states being sanctioned – as Mack and Khan (2000, p. 280) note in a study on the subject:

The only real disagreement in the contemporary sanctions literature relates to the degree to which sanctions fail as an instrument for coercing changes in the behaviour of targeted states. No study argues that sanctions are in general an effective means of coercion, although individual sanction regimes can and sometimes do succeed.

For decades, nay centuries, the absence of Western freedoms has been used to bolster the case for military intervention. Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving chronicles the stereotypes and caricatures drawn of Muslim women, often portrayed as hapless and helpless, relentlessly oppressed and dominated, desperately hoping for Western saviors to set them free. Belén Fernández wrote a piece for Al Jazeera in 2021 on the US’s “civilizing mission” and how women’s rights featured in it. Fernández outlined western rhetoric on Muslim women in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere that was used to support intervention, to make aerial bombings appear as acts of altruism and gracious magnanimity. As if Muslim women are benefited when their neighborhoods are bombed, when they along with their families and friends are killed, maimed, and injured, and when the place they call home is destroyed beyond recognition. And yet, as Fernández notes, “the West never grows weary of its civilising missions – or all of the lies that sustain them. This grand exercise in deception is aided significantly by a mainstream press that tirelessly peddles recycled rhetoric to a public consciousness seemingly impervious to worldly reality.”

The lies Fernández refers to have been brought into sharp relief in recent months following the fallout from October 7th and the murderous, unhinged, and genocidal conduct of the Israeli state. Earlier today (January 24th at the time of this writing), numerous news outlets ran a cover story on a Russian attack on Ukraine that killed five civilians. Marija Pejčinović Burić, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, referred to the attack as “barbaric,” further stating that “No child should experience what the Ukrainian children are going through.” Of course, Burić has been as silent as a mouse on Palestine. Her most direct remarks have been reserved to praise Israel and offer her support for it. The Palestinian children matter little to folks like her. Palestinian civilians, being killed by the thousands, are collateral damage and irrelevant. Joe Biden sees the reported death counts as Hamas propaganda, even as Israeli intelligence and the IDF considers them reliable. Women’s rights? Not for Palestinian women. Their miscarriage rates have gone up 300% while they have been forced to use tent cloths for their periods due to the inhuman Israeli bombardment. Meanwhile, Israelis gather to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza. Nothing “barbaric” here, of course.

What becomes abundantly clear after an even cursory review of what is occurring in Palestine is how little the strongest advocates of Western freedom care about those freedoms the moment it becomes politically inconvenient to do so, or when it might implicate the untouchable ally that is Israel. International law is openly defied to the point of absurdity by the rogue state, but with little consequence. Recently, South Africa filed an 84-page lawsuit against Israel with the ICJ alleging genocide, which the White House NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby dismissed as “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” Last week, the ICJ issued provisional judgments ordering “Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” The State Department has elected to spin the findings as vindicating Israeli malevolence, stating that the ICJ initial findings confirm that Israeli aggressions do not constitute genocide. Worse yet, in a clear effort to detract from the substance of the ICJ ruling, the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and a few others announced that they are pulling funds from the Gazan relief agency UNRWA, alleging that seven of its thirteen thousand member staff in Gaza participated in the violent attacks of 10/7. Suspending aid to starving people is now being framed as necessary and a moral imperative.

This is nothing new. The United States routinely thumbs its nose at international law. It is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Rome Statute, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC, and has taken punitive action against the ICC when it so much as considered investigating American war crimes in Afghanistan, something President Obama readily admitted took place (“we tortured some folks”). More recently, the US has moved to block Swiss efforts to discuss Geneva Convention violations by Israel, while refusing to state clearly whether Geneva Convention protections apply to Palestinian territories. Videos showing innocent Palestinian civilians waving white flags being shot by the IDF are ludicrously problematized by State Department spokespeople as lacking sufficient context. At no point is settlement expansion ever reined in meaningfully. At no point are their malevolent campaigns and brutalizing of the Palestinians a point of concern for the erstwhile champions of “freedom” and “liberty.”

The silver lining is that the specter of it all offers profound clarity for those who have been deluded into believing in the West’s moral superiority. Those who, for too long, felt insecure about their faith, prayed endlessly for a “Muslim John Locke” to emerge, and wished for nothing more than for Muslims to ape Western norms and values. Seeing the illusion for what it is and recognizing power politics, tribalism, callous disregard for human life, and authoritarianism championed by the “superior West” helps recalibrate your view of the world. Or at least it should.

The ICJ has “ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Reactions from Palestinian activists and supporters have varied widely. For many, the ICJ ruling represents a major victory, one that should signal the beginning of the end of Israel’s genocidal war. Jeremy Scahill has called it a “historic victory,” while other liberal outlets have called the ruling “stunning.” Not everyone, however, has been pleased. Many have expressed outrage at the ICJ’s omission of a clear directive for a permanent ceasefire. Others have similarly been angered by the ICJ’s seemingly subdued findings relative to their more strident remarks in the case brought before them of an alleged genocide against Ukraine by the Russians. I suppose we will see what happens in the coming weeks.
“Abandon Biden” has been picking up steam - I have some thoughts on it which I will be publishing in the coming weeks, keep a lookout.
Nancy Pelosi has suggested that Palestine activists are “connected to Putin.” The absurdity would be comical if it weren’t sad and pathetic.