Gaza proved that the West is in a moral crisis

Recently, critic Joseph Fahim published an article about the recent Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) with the headline: "Berlinale ends with crackdown on pro-Palestinian filmmakers." In it, two directors (one Israeli, one Palestinian) dared to openly speak the truth about the foundations of racism and apartheid in Israel.

"The anti-Palestinian 'storm' led by German politicians and the local media has tried to silence any voice that dares to criticize Israel," Fahim writes. "What I witnessed was not just ugly, inhumane or unprofessional, but a downright fascist act . "

One of the German officials, the Minister of Culture Claudia Roth, applauded the Palestinian director and the Israeli filmmaker at the time.

This is in line with the German position regarding the current genocide that Israel is carrying out in Palestine. When South Africa formally accused Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice in January , Germany tried to defend Israel and save it from global condemnation.

The Namibian president immediately reminded Germany of its history of genocide in Africa and said : "Namibia has not yet paid for the bloodshed it has committed on its soil!" he noted. Between 1904 and 1908, Germany exterminated more than 70,000 Herero and Nama peoples. What Israel has done in Palestine is just a page taken from the textbook that Germany wrote long ago .

Last month, Nicaragua took Germany to the International Court of Justice, accusing it of violating the Genocide Convention by funding Israel's war on Gaza, a reference to that racism. "Germany is directly aiding and abetting the genocide by sending military equipment and defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which provides vital aid to civilians," Nicaragua's statement said.

What do South Africa, Namibia and Nicaragua have in common? The reason for their solidarity with Palestine is that they too were victims of the barbaric European colonialism.

Colonial history

The garb sold to the world as “Western civilization” is now taking on the guise of “barbarism.” To understand why German officials and the media support Zionism with such fervor and zeal, one has to remember Germany's long history of colonialism and imperialism in Africa.

Leading German philosophers such as Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) played an incomparable role in the formation of radical racism in Germany in the past, leading to contempt for universal decency. The same is reflected in the Zionist discourses of Jürgen Habermas, who is considered one of the leading philosophers today.

It is known that the history of the German Third Reich was determined by Nazi ideologues. We must seriously reconsider it today. If we remember the bloodshed of Germany in Africa, we will understand that the terrible crime of Nazi Germany and the massacre of millions of people during the Second World War were not some extraordinary mistakes in German history.

Racism occupied an integral place in the entire philosophical work of Hegel and many other German and European philosophers.

Historian Volker Berghan, in his 2017 article "German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler," notes that over the past few decades, "scholars of history, politics, sociology, as well as literature, film, gender, memory, and other fields have been engaged in the process of German colonialism in Asia, the Pacific in the 19th and 20th centuries. and presented a massive scientific study aimed at exposing the horrors of Africa.

The article describes the major shifts in thought in the study of German colonialism and imperialism "in modern German history from Bismarck to Hitler." Berghan's article states: Hitler abandoned his previous opposition to foreign colonization and ordered the creation of a ministry with a budget of 6.3 million marks for 1940 to teach the Swahili language to future recruits going to Africa (common in the Central and East African regions). was spent.

The world outside of Germany needs to pay special attention to this scientific organization, so that the next time a German Zionist supports the genocide of the Palestinians, they will learn that this barbaric desire actually goes back a long way.

An ideological leader

In his "Philosophy of History", Hegel considers four stages of world history: Eastern, Greek, Roman and German. In this scheme, he sees Africa as devoid of morality, politics and religion. In his 1993 article Hegel and Africa, writer Ronald Kuykendall exposes Hegel's violently Eurocentric worldview and places Africa at the center of his critique.

For Hegel, Africa is "the land of young children, in the darkness of the dark night, equivalent to the history of self-consciousness." He confidently tells his European readers: "The characteristic point in the life of the Negro is that his mind has not yet attained any objective existence! In this sense, the African is a completely savage and backward man."

Before our eyes, Hegel is vividly embodied as the chief ideologist of German colonialism and imperial barbarism across the continent.

In another major article, Critical Notes on Hegel's Treatment of Africa, the author Omotade Adegbindin details the serious flaws in Hegel's treatment of Africa, saying that he excluded from history an entire continent of which he had no knowledge: a focused project, which led to the birth of several of his problematic theories, such as the theory of the state and the concept of slavery in relation to class formation.

Philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, in her 2009 book Hegel, Haiti, and World History, shows how the struggles of enslaved and brutally oppressed peoples of the continent served as fodder for Hegel's philosophy. He believes that Hegel's master-slave idea may actually have originated from his understanding of the Haitian revolution.

It was through the slave revolution in Haiti that it became clear that slavery was not a natural state, but a requirement of European barbarism. We need to shift our focus from the fantasy of European philosophers, that is, how Hegel saw Haiti, to the real facts - how Habermas sees Gaza.

Considering the misery that Israel continues to inflict on Gaza in front of the eyes of the whole world, it is certainly not right for us to get involved in such liberal debates. But it is clear that Racism was central to the entire philosophical system of Hegel and many other German and European philosophers. This whole system needs to be torn down, just as the racist statues in Europe and its settler colonies around the world have been torn down.

Hamid Daboshi,

N ʻ yu - York Columbia University

Professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature