To interpret the history of western liberalism as a linear progression towards freedom and prosperity hides the role of genocide and paves the way for the normalization of this practice.
Almost thirty years ago, the end of the Cold War was celebrated in the West as the “triumph of liberal democracy” and the“end of history”, as political scientist Francis Fukuyama stated in his well-renown essay in 1989. The end of the cold war was not the triumph of freedom and democracy but the victory of neoliberalism and its regime of instrumental rationality. It was not the achievement of a political vision based on universal human rights but the feat of an ideology that has dehumanization at its core.
Since the time of its formulation, and presumably independently from the intentions of its author, the “end of history” thesis has performed as propaganda in at least three ways.
First, it supported the ideological construction of the United States and the West as the civilization leading the way in the making of history interpreted as a linear progression towards a better world that philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel described as the “realization of reason”. This interpretation, however, concealed the genocidal features of colonial and capitalist histories: the deliberate and systematic extermination of populations that opposed Western appropriation of land and other resources.
Secondly, by presenting the triumph of neoliberalism as a triumph of freedom and democracy, that thesis hid the role of instrumental rationality and managerialism in the processes of dehumanization and victimization.
Finally, as a piece of propaganda that was used to present neoliberalism as the only possible option to combine freedom and democracy, that thesis contributed to suppress the possibility for a stable and genuinely free and democratic world order could emerge from the unique historical circumstances of the end of the Cold War.
Today, Western democracies seem unable or unwilling to stop Gaza genocide. The United States, the once celebrated leader of the “free world”, is supporting Israel genocide in Gaza and sanctioning the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the governments opposing it. How have we come to this?
The naturalization of genocide
The Holocaust and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were arguably the most significant events of the Second World War because they were most influential in the formation of the postwar political order.
That order was born out of fear. It sought to tackle the fear that more and worst genocides could occur in the future by setting up principles, rules and institutions designed to protect fundamental human rights. That order was a great civilizational advance because for the first time in human history it offered governments of the world some common ethical grounds and an institutional setting to solve their disputes.
The conceptual cornerstone of that system was the idea of humanity or, more precisely, the institutionalization of the “invention of humanity”. The UN did not “invent” humanity as this notion dates back in modern form at least to the Enlightenment.
What was new, however, was its naturalization through the principles, rules and institutions created to oppose dehumanization :the “stage” that prepares the grounds for a genocide to occur. Ultimately the UN systems was designed to humanize humanity in response to the Holocaust and the nuclear genocide because these events could occur as the result of ideas that were the offspring of the dialectic aspects of the Enlightenment, and the same logic of instrumental rationality which enabled the commodification of labour necessary for capitalism to exist.
If the enlightenment liberated humanity from the oppression of supranatural superstitions and fears, it did not emancipate the West from the influence of its colonial heritage and its “colonial matrix of power”: the combination of material and immaterial tools supporting Western colonialism. Eventually, the same logic laid the conceptual grounds for the re-subordination of the newly liberated humanity to the commodification of human labour and the myths of free market capitalism.
In this perspective, the welfare state was more than just a political trick to assure domestic consensus for post-war political regimes. It was a strategy to tackle the existential threat to the dehumanization of humanity represented by unmitigated forms of capitalism.
The breakdown of the “postwar consensus”, the oil crisis of the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism prepared the grounds for radical reforms that eventually destroyed the welfare state, challenged the project of “humanizing humanity”, promoted instead the idea of humans as resource and transformed democratic citizenship in “sacrificial citizenship”: the form of citizenship in which individual are not asked to exercise political sovereignty for the polity but instead to sacrifice in the interest of the State and corporations.
The evolution of neoliberalism through globalization and digitalization demanded and enforced progressive dehumanization as the fundamental condition for the reproduction of capital.
That order was born out of fear. It sought to tackle the fear that more and worst genocides could occur in the future by setting up principles, rules and institutions designed to protect fundamental human rights.
In this perspective, the relevant feature of “surveillance capitalism” – the stage of capitalism in which the capture and commodification of personal data supports the accumulation of corporate capital and control – is not the transformation of surveillance from a cost into a profitable activity. The privatization of healthcare and prisons had already done that. Rather, the key feature is the transformation of people’s life experience into data that corporations can appropriate and use to control people’s future.
Principles alone cannot, and did not, stop genocide when they occurred e.g in Cambodia, Rwanda and Sudan. But agreement on principles makes possible institutional arrangements like the UN, enabling the collective action that can hold the perpetrators of a genocide accountable and is the best guarantee against the possibility of more genocides to occur.
Once the instrumental logic that construe humans are “resources” and the human experience of life as data to be expropriated for profit, control and, if necessary, targeting, become the pillar of the new world order, we should not wonder why effective opposition to genocide in Gaza seems impossible.
In a world like this, the notion of human rights as universals loses its significance and the occurrence of a genocide, as well as the opposition to it, depends on particulars: the relative strength of the perpetrator and the political convenience of letting it happen, compared to the costs of opposing it.
Perpetrators and bystanders are united by the instrumental rationality of neoliberalism. As this happens, the dehumanization of humanity becomes a matter of fact and genocide an inherent possibility of the workings of the new global order.
The banality of evil
The UN report about the “economy of genocide” is to date the most obvious evidence that global corporate capitalism is actively involved and making a profit in the genocide perpetrated by Israeli authorities in Gaza.
Even more significant for the argument about the role of neoliberalism in the naturalization of genocide, however, is the fact that such a production of evidence has had little or no political effects and virtually no consequences for the corporations involved and their managers. Much of anger was instead directed to the special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese who was accused of incompetence and anti-Semitism.
This shows that, in practice if not in principle, genocides are nowadays construed not in the terms of a crime against humanity but as a political practice involving the same economic and digital infrastructures essential for our societies.
In this world order, the UN has become useless or harmful: useless because the fear of genocide is not anymore something to avoid but a tool of deterrence, and harmful because the authority the UN still enjoys among the governments and the people of the world is an obstacle to more effective control over governments, people and resources.
The genocide deniers presumably deny not the facts the word “genocide” refers to but its legal and moral implications. A crime is a crime only within an established legal framework. The crime of genocide became a crime only when the UN was given the authority to establish the rules that created the crime.
For the genocide deniers, what is done in Gaza is not a crime because the UN institutional order and its rules have lost their authority and the dehumanization of humanity is now increasingly accepted by those who have the power and the interest to practice genocide.
Today, it seems that end of history and the “triumph” of the West are bringing about the erosion of the UN and the consensus on its foundational principles.
This is an unpleasant fact: those responsible for the Holocaust were punished not because they were wrong but because they were weak and lost the war. And if the state of Israel was born as a result of the Holocaust, this important difference is presumably part of its genetic cultural heritage.
Is it one of those cruel historical ironies that the same “banality of evil” German philosopher Hanna Arendt discovered during the trial of SS officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem – that Eichman was not evil or psychopath but “he merely … never realized what he was doing” – applies today to the political and corporate leaders participating to the genocide in Gaza?
The problem with the theory and practice of genocide is that, once the consensus about the “humanization of humanity” is broken, the possibility to start or to stop a genocide depends on power.
In the history of humanity, genocide is the rule not the exception. The real turning point came in the aftermath of WW2, with the establishment of the UN and the possibility of breaking with the past through the universal recognition of humanity as a single entity and the international commitment to the respect of fundamental rights.
Today, it seems that end of history and the “triumph” of the West are bringing about the erosion of the UN and the consensus on its foundational principles, in a process led by the US and its close ally, Israel. One of the effects of this erosion is the widespread inaction to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The naturalization of inaction towards genocide will naturalize genocide as politics with other means and will make it easier for more genocides to come – while the memory of the Holocaust will be used “to conceal other genocides”.
The re-naturalization of genocide means that the practice of systematic annihilation of an entire populace is not anymore something that should never happen again to anyone but increasingly a form of “politics by other means”, made possible by technology and justified by political convenience.
History on the move again: Opposing the naturalization of genocide
In his 1989 essay, Fukuyama wrote he was concerned that the end of history would have been “a very sad time” for the lack of “worldwide ideological struggles” worth living and dying for.
Today perhaps he should rejoice at the realization that the ideological struggle is far from over. The good piece of news here is that the global order of neoliberalism is neither “the best” nor the final one. The ugly truth, however, is that the possibility of change for the better is far from granted. And the bad news here is that the ongoing genocide will continue until the leadership in Israel and the US believe it is possible and useful to do so.
If the genocide cannot be stopped, we could at least try to avoid its naturalization. To do this, we should avoid to tackle the feeling of impotence with the escapism of “victim blaming”: blaming the victim of aggression when we cannot stop the aggressor.
The struggle for the universal freedom of democracy is more actual than ever: history is on the move again.
We should instead learn from the Holocaust and preserve the memory, practice documentation, remember the victims, their names, their stories, and give memory an epistemic dimension through the continuous creation of knowledge about genocide. To remember is fundamental to avoid impunity and to lay the grounds for accountability when the circumstances will allow for that.
Finally, we should keep in mind that opposing the naturalization of genocide is not anti-Semitic but a moral duty for those who care about humanity, including the many Israeli and Jews that have condemned it and expressed concern about its implications.
To accuse these people of antisemitism contributes to the naturalization of genocide and to shield its perpetrators from accountability. It reveals the inclination to destroy the legal foundations of international order, to abuse the significance of the Holocaust and its terrible lesson, ultimately to compromise the future of humanity, and to secure impunity for its perpetrators.
The lesson to learn today is not that freedom and democracy are impossible but rather that they are incompatible with the instrumental and dehumanizing logic of neoliberalism. The struggle for the universal freedom of democracy is more actual than ever: history is on the move again and the fight has just begun.
Matteo Stocchetti is a docent in political communication at Helsinki University and Åbo Akademie.
Article image: Tomer Texler / Unsplash
