No, we are NOT the good guys

Years ago I ran this as my masthead quote. Though focused on the USA, it applies to the West at large.

As I sipped my coffee this morning and gathered my thoughts for part 3 of my nail-biting series, US Neocons & Israel’s far Right, I saw this in a comment on Part 2:

Perhaps Israel’s US/UK/EU-supported destruction of Gaza and its attacks on Lebanon are slowly opening people’s eyes to the reality of US strategy. I fear, though, that it will be a long time before my friends in Australia accept that the Bidens, Starmers, and VdLs of the world pose a far greater threat to world peace and progress than Putin or Xi ever will.

As it happens another Australian has a post out this morning echoing that sentiment. Over to Melbourne in Down-Under DC, and its Stakhanovite blogger, Caitlin Johnstone:

We Really Are The Bad Guys And This Really Is The Evil Empire

It can be nice to live in the western world, but the western world is not nice. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet, and it’s not even close.

It takes some learning and insight to understand that western civilization really is the absolute worst. There can be a kind of hipster tendency to judge your own society more harshly than you do others, and at first glance it can look like that’s what’s going on when western critics of the western empire denounce the criminality of their own government and allies more harshly than Russia, China or Iran. It’s not until you’ve done a fair bit of research that you see we are quantifiably more destructive than any other power on earth, by a massive margin. We really are the bad guys; the evil empire, and everyone slamming us as murderous monsters are absolutely correct.

Call this a shameless plug but, if daunted by that “fair bit of research”, you could do worse than my whistle-stop summation in US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2. But back to Caitlin:

Whenever I say this I get westerners going “Oh yeah well I’d much rather live here then over there”  or “Oh well if it’s so bad here then why don’t you go live over there?”  but the fact they immediately start babbling about where they’d prefer to live is just a symptom of how sick and twisted this civilization is.

Four years ago, in God’s Warriors: America’s Christian Right, I approached that same specious argument from a different tack. In the spirit of the William Blum quote I opened with, I followed a quote from former Sunday School teacher, CIA chief and US Secretary of State Mike “we lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo …

I must say, as I travel, you don’t see individual families trying to migrate to Iran, or to Russia, or to Venezuela.  Those countries offer abuse, not the opportunities that free nations can afford peoples.

… with the observation that

Trump was blunter with his “shit-hole countries” but I’ve heard nicer chaps than Mike Pompeo voice the same childish logic. I liken it to the local bully – his thefts, extortions and power to ostracise resistance making his house the richest in the ‘hood – insisting he’s Virtue Incarnate, the sweetest guy in town. His proof? Everybody wants to hang out at his place.

Back to Caitlin, who drives home the point.

They’re so cognitively and emotionally divorced from the violence and tyranny their government wreaks on the global south they reduce the question of which countries are worst to one of how pleasant it would be for them personally to live in. Yes, asshole, it’s nice to live in the imperial core, receiving the benefits of mass murder and imperialist extraction, and less nice to live where the murder and extraction is happening. That’s the entire fucking point here.

It is the entire fucking point, for reasons I set out – in tones a shade less less earthy – seven years ago in a post on Monbiot, Syria and the principle of Universalism.

Caitlin wraps things up …

It can be nice to live in the western world, but the western world is not nice. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet.

… then moves to other matters.

The Democratic Party really does look ready to lose yet another easily winnable election by running yet another awful, murderous candidate with awful, murderous policies, and then once again blame their loss on everyone in America who is a better person than they are.

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Always having to search for photos of Israel’s destruction of Gaza for my articles really drives home the fact that this didn’t start last year. I’m always like “Here’s one! Wait, this one’s from 2008. Here’s one! No this is from 2014. Oh hey! Bah, nope, different bombing, 2021.”

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My first encounter with Israelis was when I was backpacking through South America in my twenties, and I remember being shocked by how consistently awful they all were. I guess after their mandatory military service they tend to go traveling for a bit, and whenever I’d run into them they were reliably some of the nastiest people I’d ever encountered.

They weren’t ever nasty to me, though. I am a white westerner, and I never had a problem with them. They were nasty to the impoverished brown-skinned people who were hosting us. They were obnoxious and bullying toward local guides, they’d leave the place in a mess, and they were always trying to screw over the locals for a better deal or extra meals or favors. One time they tricked a hostel into putting up a sign in Hebrew for other Israeli backpackers which said ugly things about our hosts (they told the hostel owner it was a great review), which I only know because they were laughing hysterically about it and told me. They consistently treated the people who were looking after us like they were much lesser than us. Their pushiness and entitlement were just unbelievable.

I lived with Israelis for two years; long enough to give some insight. National stereotypes don’t come from nowhere and their ferocious conditioning, with its “Never Again” culture (i.e. never again on the receiving end) in tandem with the racial supremacism attendant on all colonial settlement – and, in its scriptural fundamentalist wing, the certainty of being God’s Chosen – often begets arrogance. (Much as my country’s conditioning makes us passive-aggressive. Ask foreigners of diverse country of origin living in Britain about the anger simmering just below the surface. I have.)

That arrogance was often tempered by more attractive traits. I grew close to some (though as students of a ‘spiritual teacher’ we shared an atypical fraternity and I am in any case a white Westerner.) Nor do I forget those Israelis brave enough to denounce their criminal state from within. When I hear the journalist Gideon Levy on the Gaza genocide I marvel at his courage, and liken it to someone walking the streets of New York City on September 12 with a placard saying “I love Al Qaeda”.

As for travel, I endorse Caitlin’s experience. In India or Thailand, Ethiopia or Vietnam, Israelis always travelled in large groups – negating the prime benefit of travel, exposure to other ways of seeing – and often behaved with the boorishness she describes.

It was a very educational experience for me. I knew the Palestinians were being treated unfairly because my father had told me so, but I also had a great love of Jews and Jewish culture. I had visited Auschwitz and Dachau and Anne Frank’s house in my travels, and I remember having some romantic ideas about kibbutzim. This was my first time directly encountering the reality that there is something unhealthy about Israeli society. Not Jews or Jewish culture, but Jewish Israelis.

Me too. Few of us who now despise Israel set out with that perspective. It took acquaintance with the facts, including an understanding of Israel’s role as the west’s beachhead in the middle east, for us to disentangle and deconstruct a mendacious but powerful narrative.

Now I see evidence of this on my news feed every day, in the IDF soldiers prancing around in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women, in the AI translations of Hebrew tweets, in the polls which show widespread Israeli approval for the atrocities in Gaza, in Israeli TikTok videos mocking the suffering of the Palestinians, in the Israelis showing up in my comments justifying the worst things in the world in the most depraved ways imaginable.

My encounters with Israelis in South America were an early taste of ugly things to come. Everything I glimpsed then I’ve been seeing online over the past year. I keep thinking about those obnoxious pricks I met all those years ago, and about how they didn’t know at the time that they were giving me very useful information for me to make use of in the future.

When Israel supporters tell you to shut up about Gaza until you’ve been to Israel and met Israelis, just ignore them. Don’t go to Israel; you’re a westerner, they’ll be nice to you. You can just go to one of the tourist spots in the global south that Israelis like to visit — one with lots of brown-skinned people who’ve been colonized by the west — and watch how they treat people there. That will show you what Israelis are really like.

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