In truth, western moral authority never existed. It was just immoral authoritarianism the whole time. They told us they were civilizing us while treating us like animals, and treating our animal kin even worse. For centuries the most historically violent, genocidal, racist, and corrupt countries on Earth saw fit to lecture everybody else on morality, backing it up with occupation, guns, and starvation. Today the same people still see fit to lecture us, backing it up with coups, bombs, and sanctions (same things, new words).

Did this unchanging White Empire ever change its ways? Did they ever stop pillaging people and the planet? Lol no. They just changed the marketing on colonialism and did it again, way past its sell-by date.‘Civilizing’ became ‘development’, ‘dominion’ became ‘debt’, ‘Christendom’ became ‘democracy’, and ‘Rule Britannia’ became ‘the rules-based order’. The same colonial ghouls kept doing what they were always doing, which was colonizing. As my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day.

I call this authoritarianism because this perverse morality has always been violently imposed. The logic has always been ‘what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, and aren’t you lucky to be crushed under such a nice boot?’ This behavior is, in fact, immoral and could not persist without rampant, wall-to-wall propaganda about how nice the boots are, and how vile the vermin underneath. And so it continues to this day. The western world and those that suffer under it are absolutely blanketed with (privatized) propaganda about how great and moral they are and how the world would be so dangerous and unstable without them.Yet they are the danger and the instability! They are the ones who knock! If they simply fucked off, the world would be in much better shape. They assume they have some moral authority, but it’s just another whip to a slave.

To be honest, I believed in western moral authority long after it was gone (indeed, it never existed at all). I grew up in the heart of America and I remember getting emotional at the Thomas Jefferson memorial and clipping out bombers in the first Iraq War, like it was a game. I was, in my defense, a teenager. I also lit shit on fire and shoplifted for kicks. We have to grow up some day.

For many people that growing up came after 9/11, when America responded to global support with collective punishment of the Muslim world. Obviously too late to not bomb Afghanistan, but they felt bad about it later. To even more people, some growing came with the second Iraq War, there were huge protests at that completely random destruction of a country. Unfortunately, what people think is not relevant to moral authoritarianism.Sadly the fire starters and shoplifters that never grew up are in charge of imperial foreign policy and they’ve only failed upwards. The same media and political caste that incited all of those wars (and more) are still here, and they’re even more openly genocidal now.

Today the latest party line, after wrecking and forgetting about Ukraine in their ‘good intentions’, is that any part of the Empire which is attacked can respond back with genocidal violence, suspending all rules of war and human decency. This is the ‘rules-based order,’ there’s no rules if you dare fuck with it at all. This order is really just, as Orwell said, a boot stomping on a human face forever, from the Native Americans to the actual Indians to the Palestinians now. The shine on the boot is that this is all somehow moral, defending babies or stopping terrorism or something. Now they don’t even bother with coherent excuses much, they just stomp.

Right now, in reaction to Hamas daring to break out of the Gaza Strip and hit some Israeli military targets (with civilian damage), Israel is deciding to just indiscriminately bomb every civilian in the Gaza Strip, a concentration camp that they have sealed or bombed the exits too. You would think that the open starvation, water-deprivation, and bombing of a concentration camp would be the final wake-up call, but no, moral authoritarianism dies hard. Despite the decline of manufacturing in the West, consent can still be manufactured.

And to that end, the western press and politicians are united in supporting the openly genocidal Israeli government in committing genocide. They’re using the same propaganda trope of ‘good guys vs. terrorists’, but in this case, something looks obviously off. The good guys are dropping phosphorous bombs on homes while the ‘terrorists’ are much more proportional. The Israelis and the western media tried to make up stuff about killing babies and rape (the classic excuse for murdering ‘savages’), but those have proved to be lies, and people can simply see the true destruction caused by western arms. The propaganda is starting to wear off, at least in the South.

What we can see is the naked hypocrisy of western morality. The Empire has no clothes, and he’s flashing us, nonconsenually I must add. A population of over 2 million, half of them children, is being held within a concentration camp (the exits closed or bombed) and deprived of food and water. More bombs have been dropped on a small city than were dropped on Afghanistan in a year. White phosphorus bombs have been dropped on them, burning flesh to the bone wherever it touches. School, hospitals, refugee camps, and food supplies have been bombed. People have been told to flee on ‘safe’ roads and then those roads have been bombed. Medics and ambulances have been bombed. First responders are bombed, leading savable people to die agonizingly in the rubble. Entire families are wiped out. It’s a textbook genocide, unless you watch western media.

Watch, for example, this catastrophically candid interview with the Israeli Ambassador to the UK. As Gathara described the exchange, “Just listen to this justification for genocide. Boils down to “you guys did it so we are entitled to do it”. And look at how she grabs at trigger words — babies, Nazis, ISIS — to avoid the issue and to justify mass murder.” To judge for yourself, the Ambassador said:

And I’m going back to the world coalition fighting Isis. So Mosul was a place where 100,000 civilians were killed [not quite]. I don’t want to go back to your history by targeting German cities. Dresden was a symbol of that because you knew that this is the only way to beat the Nazis and make them surrender. This is the reality that Israel is facing cruel, cruel, barbaric terror organization. This is Al Qaeda. This is ISIS. This is similar to the Western Coalition in the last few years, the world is a better place without ISIS. The world would be a much better place without Hamas.

It sounds cruel and deranged, but the Ambassador is right. The western method — including in World War II — was to bomb civilian populations. Unlike the USSR — which destroyed the German Army directly — the western allies relied heavily on bombing civilian populations, even dropping atomic bombs on two cities in Japan. Israel is simply asking for this right, to bomb people and take their land. This is how its western allies were founded and enriched, what don’t they understand? And, of course, they do understand. The West does extend this colonial right to Israel, which includes the right to call your victims savages (and maybe give them a land acknowledgment 200 years later).

Given carte blanche from the West, the language coming from Israel now is openly genocidal. Israeli’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything… I have ordered a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. There are no civilians in Gaza.” And these are the polite calls for genocide. The level of genocidal language from Israel is off the charts, and this is what western governments and their propaganda outlets are supporting.

Thus you have the British state media (the BBC) asking important questions like ‘Does Hamas build tunnels under hospitals and schools?’ What a nice pretext for bombing hospital and schools. Western media outlets routinely say Israelis were ‘killed’ while Palestinians ‘died’ and even when their own journalists are murdered they say it was because ‘rockets fired from the direction of Israel’. They torture language as much as the mangled bodies underneath their bombs. The western media provides air cover through propaganda as much as their warplanes dropping ordnance. They are ginning up genocide as much as Radio Rwanda.

In America, the US President got on TV and repeated outright lies about beheaded babies and rape, blood libel to justify an ongoing pogrom which has now claimed the life of a Palestinian child in America itself. Western governments are banning or smearing protests as ‘supporting Hamas’, as if that’s A) what people are doing and B) worse than supporting the actively genocidal government of Israel.

They’re trying to market a genocide as somehow moral because terrorism, but we’ve been told that a dozen times before a dozen other outrages from the Western core. After over a million dead and tens of millions displaced in America’s Terror Wars, people know who the real terror is. After the ‘well-meaning’ destruction of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the White Empire has no more faith and credit left. After their doublespeak about how bad Russia is in Ukraine (having killed less children total than Israel in a day), no one takes these hobgoblins seriously anymore. This wretched White Empire was always lying while people were dying. They’ve always been killing and stealing land slowly, and in Palestine they’re suddenly doing it all at once. Israel is calling for a million people to be ethnically cleansed by moving south (while bombing the ‘safe roads’) and the West calls this humanitarianism. There’s no morality here, and even their moral authoritarianism is losing its grip. People can see genocide in front of their eyes, and there isn’t enough wool to cover up all the blood.

The last vestige of western moral authority is being buried in Palestine, along with the bodies of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children who deserved so much more. These are just the most recent martyrs to colonialism, and it’s happening on our watch. How many more souls have to die before we learn to stop believing what colonizers say, and simply look at what they do? Simply look at Palestine, right now. Imagine that thirst in your own children, imagine the bombs dropping day and night, and imagine being hemmed into that place by a hostile military, while an American aircraft carrier blocks any relief by sea. Is the genocidal party really that hard to see? Is it not the same people who have been doing this same thing, for four hundred years of bloody history? Why would anyone believe these colonial ghouls again? They never reformed. They just reloaded and now they’re unloading in our faces.

The fact is that western moral authority never existed, it was immoral authoritarianism the whole time. Now we can see it plain. And so the last vestige of western moral authority is buried in Palestine, in a mass-mediated grave.