The previous step to hate crimes and war crimes, in the modern/colonial world-system, has always been the dehumanization of the other; that is to say: the denial of a part of humanity. As the decolonial sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos explains, modern Western thought operates on abysmal lines that divide what human from what subhuman, in such a way that human principles are not compromised by inhuman practices.
Hate crimes and war crimes are based on the denial of other and in hegemonic discursive practices in which others They are described as "beasts", "soulless beings", "forces of evil", "murderers", "savages", "communists" or, simply, people who need to "be saved". The modern line of ethnoracial hierarchy assigns other the sentence of non-being; In a word: inhuman. This absence of "humanity", aired by the pattern of modern power, seeks to legitimize attacks against otherness, by positioning hate crimes (discrimination, application of suffering, attacks, physical or symbolic murders) as "acceptable" and "necessary." against individuals and specific groups (human and non-human), who are denied their historical condition of dignity. Here, according to what the liberation psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró points out, what is interesting to highlight is not so much the negative labeling but the potential danger contained in negative, systematic and prolonged labeling, which triggers a consequence, a submission. , a threat of death or death to those who have been targeted. Racist labeling seems to alleviate feelings of guilt and—what is more deplorable—foster dispositions so that the prolongation of domination is desirable and so that the exclusion, subordination and inferiorization of those who are considered below the line of humanity are endorsed.
With the “imperial war,” better known as the “war on terrorism,” the continuities of colonial discourse on human rights have become more overt and more perverse. This is how Puerto Rican teacher Ramón Grosfoguel puts it: «State terrorism and its coloniality of power are justified by accusing resistance movements of being “terrorists.” State atrocities, the violation of human rights and even genocidal crimes are now legitimized by the West, in the name of the fight against “terrorism” (…). Gaza is the most visible example of the colonial consequences of the “war on terrorism”, which is used today as the main mechanism to defend state terrorism around the world, to combat liberation movements. The policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, which already existed since the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, are now openly justified with the new rhetoric of the fight against terrorism. Even though Hamas was democratically elected and its government destroyed through state terrorist mechanisms by both Israel and the United States, the use of the term “terrorism” is mobilized to justify Israel's massacres with the support of the entire West.
It is no coincidence that, in the face of the Israeli genocide against Palestine, the imperialist media replicates messages like these: "Palestinians dead"; "Israelis murdered." It is also no coincidence that spokespersons from multilateral organizations demonize the Palestinian resistance movement, while covering up/defending Israeli atrocities and necropolitics against Palestine (further: the message they send to the perpetrators of genocides is that they have the green light to commit their crimes). The hypocrisy is such that, when the wall of aggression is broken, it is taken as an offense; but they do not say that the wall itself was the greatest offense to the dignity of a people. The world upside down!, which is how the modern/colonial world-system works.
The crime against Palestine is a continuation of colonialism, in the form of fascism: a mixture of racism and coloniality, which establishes a apartheid, openly and shamelessly. The invention of modernity/coloniality—which includes hierarchy, asymmetry and domination—continues to massacre people. As the ideologue of negritude, Aimé Césaire, denounced, Hitlerism continues. What happened with Hitler was not an anomaly of the modern world-system: they are the same methods that Germany, France, England, Belgium, Spain... all imperialist countries apply against Caribbeans, Africans, and Gypsies. When crimes are committed against otherness, the West tolerates Hitlerism; But they cry out to heaven when it touches them, as happened with the genocide against the Jews. Césaire argues that Hitlerism existed before Hitler: it is a colonial, imperialist, racist ideology, of a system of death; In other words: it is a constitutive part of Western subjectivity. For this Antillean thinker, Hitlerism is what the West was doing to the rest of the non-Western world for 400 years (and continues to do).
Today, in the XNUMXst century, the dehumanization of the non-Western majorities of the world continues. Palestine suffers it, in its traumatized and decimated corporality. The abuse against Palestine is based on the imperial/colonial supremacist idea, in which laws and rights are for Jews; and he who is not Jewish is a 'second class' citizen. Hitlerism is a cancer of modernity that eats away at humanity.
"Today Gaza is the continuity of the Warsaw ghetto," denounces Ramón Grosfoguel. This decolonial sociologist asks: What is the difference between the Gaza ghetto and the Warsaw ghetto? What differentiates Hitlerism from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? What is the difference between the Nazi war machine and the American war machine? It is even more incisive: How can we qualify US support for military dictatorships that practiced Nazi methods of torture and murder, such as Pinochet, Videla, Duvalier, Somoza, Batista, Trujillo? How do we define the US policies of organizing, financing and deliberately encouraging military coups in the 'third world', which tortured, disappeared and exterminated an entire generation of human beings, in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East? How many millions of civilians were killed in CIA military coups, in Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, Congo and Iran? It is a shameful fact: Hitlerism continues to manifest itself today. In the Middle East, Hitlerism today is embodied and practiced by Israel. As Grosfoguel warns, anyone who practices colonialism and whose imagination is infected by racism has the potential to lead to Hitlerism, genocide and, consequently, to become a war criminal. "Human beings, including the Jewish people, are not immune from this temptation." Today, the State of Israel emulates its perpetrators and commits the aberrant atrocities that the Nazis perpetrated against the Jewish people.
Ramón Grosfoguel denounces how European Jews reproduce, in Palestine, the classic forms of European colonialism, with the consent and support of the British Empire. What's more: the formation of the State of Israel was done at the cost of the massacre of Palestinians (Christians and Muslims). The genocide against Palestine, understood in the Grosphoguelian approach, is a radical questioning of hegemonic narratives, as well as the end of reductionist narratives of international Jewish identity as "victims": "There is no doubt that the Jewish people were colonial subjects and victim of all kinds of atrocities in Christian Europe, for a period of several centuries (from his expulsion, along with the Muslims, from Catholic Spain, in 1492, until his extermination during the Nazi holocaust, in World War II) . However, this led to a simplistic notion of the Nazism and an essentialized vision of the Jews. From Judeophobia to Judeophilia, from eternal evil to eternal victim; Eurocentric racist thought could not think of Jewish identity outside of essentialist binaries. These simplistic and reductionist narratives about the Holocaust and Jewish identity were exploited by the Zionists, over the last sixty [seventy] years, to legitimize their Jewish fundamentalist state built on the practices and methods of population colonialism against the Palestinians.
The questions that emerge from the reflection of the aforementioned Puerto Rican decolonial sociologist deepen the thematization: Can we imagine what the reaction would be in the West, today, if some Arab State did to the Jews what Israel is already doing to the Palestinians? the Palestinians? What would be the reaction of the West if an Arab state massacred the Jews, the way Israel massacred the Palestinians? By the way - adds Ramón Grosfoguel - it is important to mention that Palestinians and Jews under the Ottoman Muslim empire had more political, democratic and civil rights than those that Palestinian Muslims and Christians had during the British colonial occupation of Palestine and under the 70s. of the colonialism of the Israeli State. Furthermore, Persians and Jews have more social and civil rights under the Islamic Republic of Iran today than Palestinian Muslims and Christians have under the Zionist Republic of Israel. However, neoconservative elites in the West define "Judeophobia" and "anti-Jewish anti-Semitism" as the hegemonic forms of racism in the West today, in order to perversely blame Arabs and Muslims for anti-Semitism, and for the sake of hide the hegemonic forms of white racism today, which are, for the most part, “anti-Black racism” and “anti-Arab/Muslim Islamophobic anti-Semitism.”
El enough already that we express against Hitlerism... it is no longer enough against the Jews, it must be a never more against any human being, never more against mother earth. We must strongly and permanently condemn the idea of racist hierarchy - as the foundational and constitutive logic of the modern/colonial world, which affects all social relations - whatever its manifestations. That must be the big lesson!
The genocide against Palestine is an alarm that repeats to us that humanity must rid itself of modern subjectivity: that subjectivity of fear of otherness, which has configured a logic of political power based on domination, in which it seems that our nature is violence. In other words: we have the responsibility and the need to make die that dominating subjectivity, denying the other…so that the real possibility of experiencing ourselves as humans is born.
The cry for "help" of the Palestinian people is the same cry of pain of the loneliness of Christ on the cross. The word of the Palestinian people is the mirror of the word of the oppressed of the system, of those who we can not see. The maestro Enrique Dussel would say: «His cry of pain is the same cry of the infinite, is the one who listens to the furious God of Hosts to avenge the blood of the innocent. In response to the questioning of other [in this case, with the real, concrete, historical face of Palestine], faith opens: having its protest, its claim, as true. It is believing that your need is the commandment of the absolute [the absolute other] hic and nunc: at now and he toqu of history. The genocide of Palestine, which is the echo of so many other exterminations, we must stop! The lament and protest of Palestine exhort us to take up the cause of the cry of the damned of the earth and to assume community responsibility for the different other.
«Today, we have to think about how we go from fierce hatred to restoring love –warns the Mexican philosopher Katya Colmenares, and adds –: to see ourselves reflected in the pain of other (which could be mine, which could be anyone's). Justice cannot be justice for me; justice must begin by doing justice for the other. This means putting ourselves at the service of community life and taking charge. Only the reconstitution of the community can bring about order other. Any peace agreement or any struggle that does not contemplate responsibility for the other It is mere hypocrisy. The pain of Palestine was the pain of the people of our America yesterday. The world demands a civilizational change! Enough of the damn racism and all forms of domination!
