October 7, 2024, marked one year of horrendous war crimes in Palestine – a textbook case ofgenocide. A holocaust in the making, televised live. Nearly 42,000 Palestinians were killed, morethan half of them women and children, in a besieged enclave. A modern-day death camp similarto Auschwitz. All in the name of protecting Western liberal values. Today, we must ask a criticalquestion: How can liberalism stand for such barbarism? How can it justify atrocities andgenocide?
Liberalism was a natural product of atrocities committed by monarchies and religious institutions.It liberated the masses from the divine right of kings. Liberalism stood on the core values ofindividual freedom, a call to reason and a just society. It grants freedom of speech, religion, andthought. It advocates for Equality irrespective of status, wealth and background. Black or white,rich or poor, you are equal. It supports the rule of law and democracy. These values gave birth topolitical upheavals such as the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Americanand French Revolutions, and the 19th-century reform movements. From these lofty values to greatrevolutions, I take you to the downside of liberalism. Its inherent flaws enable such atrocities and policies of genocidal tendencies. We take a brief look into the history of liberalism first.
History of Liberalism
The history of liberalism can be divided into five stages per se. The first was Classical liberalismfrom the 17th to the 19th century. It fuelled great revolutions in America and France. Thinkers likeJohn Locke, also called the “father of Liberalism”, argued for rights to life, liberty, and prosperity.Thus came into being Constitutional Democracies.
The second stage started with industrialisationin the 19th century, which brought new challenges to deal with – economic equality, workers’ rights, etc. John Stuart Mill and T.H. Green advocated for an active governmental role inaddressing these issues, and thus was born Modern Liberalism. The 20th century evolved thisliberalism into a new phase, facing problems of fascism, communism, and global wars. Values ofhuman rights, civil liberties and international cooperation were born out of it. These valuesintended to make the world a just place. However, the later stages took a downward spiral.
Neoliberalism was its next stage. This system emerged out of an emphasis on free markets,privatisation, deregulation, and the reduced role of the state. Human greed has taken over andexploited through monetary organisations and multinational corporations. They were sucking lifeand blood out of the have-nots. The final stage is 21st-century liberalism, which faces challengesof Populism, authoritarianism and global insecurity and inequality.
“The history of liberalism is a tale of gradual moral decline. Once it was a philosophy of liberty;today it is merely a mask for power.”_John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998)
Before we move further into the discussion, let’s have a brief look into what is Hitlerism?
What is Hitlerism, and How It Engulfed Liberalism?
Hitlerism refers to the ideology of the Nazi regime in Germany. The term represents an extreme form offascism. Other terminologies like Nazism or National Socialism refer to the broader movement inwhich it thrived and flourished. It called for racial nationalism rooted in the superiority of bloodlineand Aryan race, totalitarianism and anti-Semitism. The idea had a physical element of creating aLebensraum (living space) for the German people. With Hitler in power, these ideas crystallisedand institutionalised into government policies. This led to aggressive expansionism, militarisationand, ultimately, the Holocaust.
Hitlerism was a development so powerful it resonated to farcorners of the world. The Aryan revival found solid footing in Indian Hindutva, too. Savitri Devi wasthe Hitler’s Priestess in India. The torchbearer of Neo-Nazism in India. Her article titled “Hitlerismand Hindudom,” edited by R.G. Fowler, was published as “Hitlerism and the Hindu World” in TheNational Socialist, No.2 (Fall 1980):18-20. Though “Hitlerism and Hindudom” was her original title.
She was on a sacred mission for Hitler and Nazism. This elderly and infirm prophetess of Aryanrevival, a philosopher of Hitler’s cosmic purpose and Nazi pilgrim in the ruins of the German Reichat the end of the World War II, had lived for years in poverty and obscurity in Calcutta (now Kolkata) andDelhi. Now, in November 1978, at the end of a long life devoted to the Aryan cause, she hadfound a new publisher. In late 1982 Ernst Zundel, the founder-proprietor of the neo-Nazi SamisdatPublishers in Toronto, publicised the availability of a set of five two-hour cassettes of liveinterviews with Savitri Devi and a brand-new edition of her out-of-print classic The Lightning andthe Sun (1958). So broad and far was the appeal of Hitlerism. Today, we need to understand andcritique how these extreme views penetrated liberalism and are fuelling Islamophobia around theworld and genocide in Palestine.
The biggest flaw in the liberal notion of freedom is its disconnect from the physical and relianceon the abstract. Western philosophy typically views freedom as an escape from nature and thephysical body. Its notions are abstract and disembodied. A society cannot be built on abstractnotions. It requires the physical connection of a medium of a body or physicality; without it, theyare just phantoms in the brain. Idealistic and romantic but unpragmatic and unreliable. Obviously,there is a vacuum that has to be filled, and Hitlerism filled it. It provided the perfect link betweenthe existence and the physical world. It gave quantifiable answers to human belongings andexistence. The biggest flaw of liberalism is that it sees human beings as abstract entities.
Separated from the nature of how they are physically and emotionally created on the face of thisearth. Thus, this freedom leads to a flawed understanding of subjectivity. By omitting the body, itdistorts the perception and understanding of what it means to be free.
To explain this philosophical complexity of physicality or abstract or body, let’s take the exampleof the modern medical approach to treatment. It focuses on treating illness at the symptom levelwithout addressing the holistic bodily experience. Such an approach has a major flaw of ignoringthe body’s fundamental role in the overall well-being of a person. So is the idea of abstractnotions ignoring the hard physical realities of human creation and existence. Liberalism’s notion ofindividual rights left the people in social isolation and disembodied notions of human existence.
The French Revolution and its trinity slogan, “liberty, equality, fraternity,” were the ideals on whichWestern society was built, but liberalism left no room for fraternity and its expression. Liberalismemphasised liberty and equality but downplayed fraternity. A value through which humans findexistence and meaning. This value was subordinated by the other two in the political framework,leaving room vacant. Hitlerism took space and filled it by elevating fraternity as the highestpolitical principle. But this fraternity was defined by bloodlines and racial unity. It was served tothe masses with a concoction of nationalism. The abstract fraternity of liberalism has noconnection with reality or human experience. Liberalism transformed fraternity into a group ofsubjects bound by a nation-state. We need something to connect and bind to one another.
Hitlerism reinterpreted it defining it as a unity of race bound by blood and heritage. These ideasformed the structural elements of the liberal societies within the project of nation-building.
These Western liberal societies had Xenophobia and Anti-Semitism as underlying mechanisms ofexclusion based on race, religion or ethnicity. Dreyfus Affair in France reveals how this mechanismworks and plays out. In 1894, a Jewish French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was chargedwrongfully with passing the military secrets to the German Army. Despite the lack of evidence, hewas sentenced to Devil’s Island – a notorious prison like the Guantanamo Bay. The truth came outand proved him to be innocent; the real culprit was another officer. The French military and thegovernment tried to cover it up. This sparked a deep divide and outrage in French societybetween those who supported Dreyfus and those who didn’t. The affair exposed widespread antisemitism,injustice, and racism in the guise of Nationalism.
Hitlerism exploits this antisemitism created because of social exclusion by liberalism andescalates into racial nationalism, triggering genocide and targeting those that are outside of thisdefinition of fraternity.
Whether Israel or India, the mechanism and underpinnings are the same: Muslims don’t haveindividual rights, liberty or justice. This is Xenophobia. This is a modern holocaust in the making inPalestine. No wonder nationalist Hindus have become cheerleaders of Israel. The completeimmunity to Israel by the US, democrats, and republicans alike unmask Hitlerism within the liberalWest.
Liberalism, Islamophobia and the Genocide in Palestine
The Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance and the American and French Revolutions paved theway for liberal thought. On the religious front, it led to two distinct expressions. One is the secularideology, the separation of the church and state, and the second on the internal religious front, theProtestant Reformation. This religious transformation has a vital role to play in today’s dynamics.
Europe was more or less catholic, and America was protestant. The revolutions brought a newchange and a society built on liberal values. These values needed to be protected and preservedagainst any threat or enemy. Any such threat is labelled as a monster. The American psyche isadapted to “Monster” mongering. A force that threatens these values and culture. A threat to thisnew power centre.
In 1800, the movement for ‘Catholic Emancipation’ rose in Britain and Ireland. Thus, Catholicswere perceived as an evil threat and pushing against liberal, protestant values. So much was theeffect of this monster-mongering that the 1855 election erupted with riots and bloodshed withallegations of Catholics interfering in the voting process. It was called the “Bloody Monday”. Afterthe World War II, this monster was communism. Today, it is the Muslims. These are theroots of Islamophobia in the West. They attack the monster today in the name of the war on terror.
Liberals have devised a code word for justifying brutality against Muslims. They call it “Islamism”.We see today that those liberals who are tolerant at home become brutal repressors in the Muslim world. The domestic success of the West today is dependent on illiberal foreign policy. Bloodycoups backed and orchestrated by the CIA in Iran (1953), Iraq (1963), Indonesia (1965), and full-scale violence in Vietnam. Post 9/11 WOT and destruction of Iraq, dismantling the political elite inthe Middle East and now a full-blown genocide in Palestine.
In 1984, Benjamin Netanyahu, then a permanent representative to the United Nations, presented,at a conference, a collection of articles titled – Terrorism, How the West Can Win. In 1986,Reagan attacked Libya after reading this conference paper. The link is direct and evident. Theproblem with liberalism is that they fail to acknowledge their positioning as participants in violentpolitical conflicts or, for that matter, blaming Western foreign policy. West’s slogan of politicaltolerance has bestowed an aura of innocence on liberals, shielding their ideologies and practicesfrom scrutiny in the name of defending the great evil.
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is one of the seminal liberal analyses oftotalitarianism. It’s a three-volume text written in different phases and later compiled as one.Volumes 1&2 were written between 1943-46, where she analyses three reasons for Nazism orHitlerism. European colonialism, Anti-Semitism and the plantocracy racism of the US South. Whilethe third was just written before the publication of the entire series in 1951; in this volume, heranalysis and focus changed utterly. Her attention shifted from Nazism to the Soviet Union, from Racism to Marxism, from Auschwitz to Gulag and finally from Fascism to Communism.
In whatwas the most significant analysis of racism in Volumes 1 & 2, Volume 3 takes a differentdirection, giving the backdoor to the West to become a monster. Today, modern WOT readers andscholars quote this Volume 3a lot. That’s how the liberal itself became the illiberal. Thereformer became a fascist. The liberal became an authoritarian.
Ideologues like Karl Popper gave justification for this savagery. His book The Logic of ScientificDiscovery is a thesis on science and the laws of exception in it. He concludes that this exceptionis the difference between genuine science and metaphysics. He uses this framework of science todefine his political thesis. The postulates that liberal societies should know when to break theirown rules of tolerance. When they have to defend against totalitarian ideologies, this exception isthe norm of today. It’s a toll to commit the worst of atrocities in the name of liberal and Westernvalues. It has become a permanent and normalised paradigm of the Western governments today.
The link between belief and behaviour raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are sodangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them … If they cannot becaptured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defence.This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and this is what we and otherWestern powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocentsabroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a warof ideas.
_ Sam Harris, The End of Faith.
They keep supplying Israel with arms, siphoning millions and millions of dollars in funds to committhe worst of atrocities on women, children and the innocent. It is convenient for Israel’s and theWest’s propaganda to claim Palestinian resistance to be immutably violent because of its Islamistideology and, therefore, needs to be met with force. The truth is that Palestinian politicalresistance can only be explained in the context of decades-long Israeli military occupation. Butthis justification of intolerance and violence against Palestinians is a backdoor through whichrepression enters the open societies. The open society has become the enemy of its own.
Liberalism today has become an ideology of total war and Genocide. Its ideal enemy is someonewho is ideologically hostile and racially and culturally different.
“Hitlerism becomes one of the ways in which liberalism pays for its distorted sense of priorities.”
_ Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism (1934)