It is very difficult to write about the moment we are living through. It is difficult to capture the sense of injustice, anger, grief, frustration, terror, and horror that overwhelms so many of us — those who do not belong to the small global minority that rules the world or benefits from its plundering. Those of us who are treated as lesser beings: disposable bodies, exploited labor, undesirable lives, inferior species, or simply obstacles to white supremacist purity, domination, and their enjoyment of violence.
Networks of Violence
It should not surprise anyone that those who take pleasure in sexual abuse can also take pleasure in violent abuse and mass murder in wars and racial domination. This is not merely about individual depravity. It is about the core of a world system governed by these people and celebrated by whole societies — heads of state, politicians, tech moguls, billionaires, diplomats, media personalities, and the networks that sustain their power.
The Epstein files revealed that those who gathered to enjoy the sexual abuse of children and women are the same circles that govern this world. Today, someone like US American Secretary of Sate Marco Rubio can stand in Munich — of all places — and praise the history of Europe’s so-called past greatness: praising five centuries of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and destruction as progress, leadership, superiority and enlightenment. And he receives a standing ovation from today’s European leaders, thirsty for a return to the times when they could so casually dominate and eradicate peoples, cultures, histories, and ecosystems.
These are the same leaders who defend their wars of aggression while condemning any resistance to them as itself the aggression. Those who will condemn dismembered babies while praising the precision rockets that dismembered them. Those who demand that others obey laws they themselves violate daily. Those who speak of diversity while fearing otherness, who preach peace while supplying the weapons that kill millions.
Addiction to Domination
The history of the so-called West is a history of endless wars — an addiction to violence and an inability to imagine relations other than domination. Domination over nature, over humans, over animals, over knowledge, over everything.
This is why the West constantly projects itself onto others. They fear migrants will occupy their lands — because that is what they do across the world. They accuse anyone seeking equality of wanting domination or destruction — because that is what they themselves pursue.
As the saying goes regarding Israel’s pathological lies about Palestine: “every accusation is a confession.” The same can be said about the West more broadly today.
And now we watch as the specter of another world war is unleashed by the same addicts of violence and domination — the same circles, the same names that appear around Epstein’s island — who now claim that their wars are meant to prevent war.
The West asks the world to stand behind it, to defend and project it as the morally superior force for good — a camp led by a wanted war criminal accused of genocide and a megalomaniac white supremacist rapist and pathological liar. Anyone who refuses to submit will be eradicated.
Colonial Heritage
The German chancellor Firedrich Merz — whose senior Nazi grandfather belonged to the generation whose crimes forced the world to create international law in the first place — recently said that “Iran should not be protected by international law,” echoing the same logic his party and allies across Europe sometimes invoke when they suggest that European laws should not protect immigrants. Of course ignoring that the very principle of law is that it applies to everyone, equally.
Of course, Merz — who a year earlier, when Israel and the United States had once again illegally attacked Iran in the middle of negotiations, described the mass killing of civilians as “the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us” — is no stranger to such racist double standards.
What the blatant boasting about plans to commit war crimes by US and Israeli officials — and their public justification by their European counterparts — exposes, once again, is that these powers have never truly broken with their white supremacist heritage. The normalization of racism and the ease with which they can justify mass killing remain deeply embedded in political culture shaped by centuries of colonial violence.
Because they deeply believe in their inalienable right to dominate the world. The world is theirs, and theirs alone. Others should be grateful simply to be allowed to exist within it as servants.
And if they are not grateful, they can be eradicated. Any resistance becomes an unacceptable act of aggression — proof that these “ungrateful” subhumans are violent savages who must be eliminated for the safety of their world. This is the same logic that drove the countless colonial genocides across the continents Europeans claimed as their own — by divine mandate or racial superiority — and it continues to this day.
Two Worlds, One Reality
It is often difficult to explain to those who are not on our side of the equation — us who are objects of various degrees of violence, potential or actual — what living with this violence does to you. How fundamentally different our experience of the world is from that of someone who does not experience the world as a death trap or an endless heartbreak.
Someone who can move through it safely and confidently. Someone born on the other side of that coin — where exploitation elsewhere brings benefits; where borders are lines on maps that one casually crosses; where wars happen somewhere else; where violence is strange and shocking; where racism is a topic of debate over dinner; where colonialism lives in history books; where politics is an interesting subject, and horror a cinematic genre.
For those of us on this side of the coin, however, all of this — and more — is life.
Sometimes I wonder how such a person grows up with the conviction that they are intrinsically a force for good in both history and present. Every film, series, book, and museum tells them a heroic story about themselves while demonizing others.
Selective Outrage, Systemic Hypocrisy
The same powers that proudly announce their readiness to violate international law are also the most enthusiastic defenders of that law when others are accused of breaching it. They are outraged by crimes identical to those they themselves commit.
For these democratically elected forces, not all humans are equal. In fact, not all humans are even worthy of being treated as humans. Laws exist to protect Merz’s “us” — and that “us” alone. Violence counts as violence only when it is directed against “us”, even when it is a reaction to violence initiated by “us”.
If only a fraction of the world’s condemnations, sanctions, and measures were instead aimed at the two outlaw states launching wars and genocide across the world, those hypocritical statements might carry some weight.
The war on Iran began the moment Iran agreed to conditions during negotiations. It opened with a war crime by the US targeting a school for young girls, killing over 150 children—with investigations suggesting this might have been intentional. Hardly surprising when we consider the past two years of mass child murder in Gaza. Yet there were hardly any condemnations, expressions of horror, let alone sanctions from the self-appointed guardians of international law, democracy, and moral superiority in Europe and elsewhere. Instead, condemnation, sanctions, and measures were reserved for Iran’s retaliatory strikes.
For 15 months since a ceasefire agreement was reached between Israel and Lebanon, the Israelis have violated it over 10,000 times, killing more than 500 people. Yet there has been no pressure, no condemnation, nothing from the world. The moment Hezbollah responded—however poorly timed—the condemnations began pouring down, but still with no pressure on Israel to stop its war crimes.
For decades, not a single attempt has been made to pressure the aggressors. To the contrary, their aggressions, humiliations, and injustices have intensified and continued, accompanied by infuriating moralizing postures from the aggressors themselves and their supporters. What do you expect people to do when you offer them no alternatives, when you repeatedly tell them that force is their only way out, that all peaceful avenues are genuinely impossible?
Violence begets violence. It is a basic truth.
The Choice of Complicity
Meanwhile, the aggressors proudly announce their crimes to the sound of silent approval from the self-proclaimed defenders of peace and democracy. An Israeli minister can declare they will do to Beirut what they did to Gaza—where an international court has determined genocide is being committed by his government. A prime minister can state his intention to occupy entire countries to create a Greater Israel. A report can casually mention that that same Prime Minister asked the military to submit additional civilian targets “for approval”.
Meanwhile, the president and his team leading the world’s most aggressive empire can bully nations to steal their resources, bluntly asserting their ancestors’ right to genocide continents. All of this occurs, and the world’s response is to condemn those who choose to oppose or resist the horror—regardless of one’s views on their ideologies or their own brutality.
The only way to confront both forms of brutality is to offer alternatives and create new ways of being that transcend the Western paradigm of domination by force and power.
Until then, condemnations must be directed at those who rule the world, not at those trying to carve out their place within it.
