By Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
Gaza has exposed the West’s ‘human rights’ as a colonial farce. Now, the world is experiencing a descent into imperial barbarism, and only collective resistance can build a future beyond fascism. "The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone." (Thomas Hobbes)
Eighteen months of genocidal horror in Gaza has finally swept away to the dustbin of history the myth that the West was ever committed to so-called enlightenment ideas of human dignity, the rule of law and human rights. And we say good riddance to this mendacious mythology.
Israel’s daily bombardment accompanies the daily horrific imagery of Israeli attacks on schools, hospitals, tent cities and broken and mangled Palestinian children, images that still fail to move public opinion in the U.S. and Europe to demand an end to the slaughter. Why? Because Gaza has finally stripped away the veil of civilization that masked moral contradictions and rationalized barbarism that has always occupied the heart of European civilizational relations with the non-European world.
From Thomas Hobbs with his strange notions of “man” in a state of nature needing a “leviathan,” a power above society to ensure the protection of “natural rights” all human beings are supposedly born with, to John Locke’s apologetics for private property and natural inequality, the language and framework of human rights never reflected an incontestable universalism of principles, but instead a narrow provincialized rationalization for white, bourgeois, male dominance.
For the people in the global South, the Western colonial project meant perpetual war. There was never any discussion of their fundamental rights, natural or human made, that was to be recognized and protected.
From this standpoint, it is clear that despite the systematic attempts at obfuscation through mass education and propaganda, our lived experience as the victims of “Western modernity” that included enslavement, capitalist exploitation and colonization, clarifies for us that the brutal execution of genocide in Gaza or the moral indifference of the West to the sufferings of Palestinian human beings is not an aberration. And that is what makes this period so incredibly dangerous.
For the colonialist, and in particular the settler colonialists, the most brutal colonialists of all forms of colonialism - the colonized are always dehumanized. The terms and, in fact, the characterization of a racialized “other” include terrorist, Black Identity Extremist, indigenous savage, Muslim terrorist, Amelek, and human animals. Stripped of their humanity, the colonized, therefore, become eligible for mass incarceration, ethnic cleansing (including displacement via gentrification), and even extermination.
As Frantz Fanon reminds us:
“The settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better, never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces.”
Systematic rape; the science of torture; burnings of towns and cities; sterilizations; chattel slavery; genocides; eugenics; concentration camps; world wars; colonial fascism are the unique products of Western civilization to global history over the last five hundred years. Therefore, how could anyone, except for the most naive, dishonest, or blind, believe that something called human rights could emerge out of the cultural milieu of ongoing and naturalized colonialism and Western imperialism?
The lurid mendacity of the Israeli policy of starvation and bombings of non-combatant Palestinian women and children with impunity, and even a moral audacity that shuns and criminalizes those who oppose the sadistic barbarity of the Israeli state represents a new norm. The normalization of this kind of state behavior is unprecedented. Even the Nazis tried to keep the realities of its final solution secret. But in 2025, the degradation and dehumanization of Palestinians is ostentatiously celebrated as a just cause because Palestinians are “terrorists,” and “human animals,” even the children, who are said to deserve all that they are experiencing.
The consequence of this is that human rights treaties have become dead letters and the United Nations related processes and structures, even new mechanisms like the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR ), are becoming shallow and insignificant side shows where petit-bourgeois lawyers and the hopeful, but naive, social activists, spend enormous amounts of time and resources, for naught. Why? Because twenty years of the U.S. and Israel operating outside the bounds of law culminating in Gaza demonstrates that the UN processes have no impact on the objective material world where the colonial/imperialist West uses power to destroy life through war and ecological madness.
In this period of a Hobbesian international state of nature, the United Nations, indeed no international power at this moment can serve as that Hobbesian Leviathan. That must come later in a post-revolutionary new global order grounded by a commitment to global cooperation and social justice. Which will only come about when the U.S. and Western Europe is completely divested of its ability to disproportionately influence world politics.
Until that transition takes place this current conjuncture will remain especially dangerous for global humanity. With the establishment of the liberal global order after the second imperialist war ended in 1945, states at least pretended to abide by the new standards of behavior represented by documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
So, even when the U.S. moved to consolidate its power by waging wars and overthrowing governments across the planet and European nations desperately tried to maintain hold of their colonial possessions through horrific violence from Algeria and Vietnam to Kenya and beyond, the standards of Nuremberg and the Geneva Conventions provided enough constraints that the states felt compelled to hide their criminality.
When U.S. and Western imperialists had to pretend that they were the ontologically civilized, humane, reasonable and innocent, it imposed some civilizing constraints on the range of their uncivilized actions. But in this era of lawless global fascism led by the U.S. and Israel those self-imposed constraints no longer exist.
Today the Israelis can suggest that Palestinians can be starved to death and not be condemned and then can have that genocidal intent translated into actual practice in Gaza with Impunity.
What this means for global humanity today is that it is a naked, brutal, power that will determine survival in the current international jungle of nation/states and oppressed nations and peoples.
The Seeds of the International State of Nature were Sowed in the Soil of Western Imperialist Relations
The historic task is clear. Fascism as a form of state rule in Northern capitalist nations emerged in the past and is emerging currently out of the ongoing and deepening crisis of capitalism. It is, like neoliberalism before it, a capitalist reform grounded in the desperate attempt to maintain capitalism. Its emergence in more blatant forms at this historical moment signals that we have entered a post-liberal era with neo fascism as the emerging organizing principle in both the North and the South.
That is why global solidarity and resistance against the normalization of barbarism represented by the fascist assault on the people of Palestine by Israeli fascism must be centered. The Palestinian national liberation project must be seen as an essential component of anti-imperialism and anti-fascism.
This understanding is vital because the Trump administration with the collusion of liberals is drawing new boundaries for who is considered human with rights that should be recognized and what groups fall outside of the human family, making them “killable.” That is why Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez marginalize genocide in Gaza.
Entire groups are being excluded with very little effective contestation of this process. This dehumanization of peoples and nations opens them up to attack, a process that is being instrumentalized to justify an attack on Iran.
What this means is that there is no time to attempt to hide hoping to escape the gaze of the fascists like what some liberals in the U.S. are attempting to do, or abandon support for nations and people’s struggles against the tin-horn fascists in the South from Bukele in El Salvador to the monarchies in West Asia.
We do not surrender, we fight it. Africans/Black people in the U.S. have a long history of anti-fascist resistance because like the indigenous people in the U.S., we both have been exposed to it the longest.
The global reorganization of capital and the global capitalist system can only lead to two outcomes. Structural constraints on capital with a corresponding reorganization of trade and global production informed by a cooperative ecosocialism and people(s)-centered human rights or a prolonged period of global fascist barbarism and the real possibility of human extinction.
We cannot escape the historic necessity of militant resistance in the face of growing fascist totalitarianism. Fear, passivity and/or resignation is not an option. The people of the world who believe in justice must fight.
No amount of BRIC’s reformism, Green New Deals or other forms of magical thinking will result in alternative outcomes.
~ Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
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