We are living in a world in which violence has freed itself of ideology, said the great German poet and sociologist Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Perhaps, we are living in a world also where the discourse has freed itself similarly from reality.
When the going gets tough, racists get going. The attack on Ukraine by Putin’s Russia has inspired a number of broadcasters, all white, to be voluble about why they consider this war to be different: the sum and substance of what they say is that the war is not in the nasty armpits of the world populated by the black or brown, but the crisis is hitting “people like us”, white Europeans.
Some have put out more parameters and the one that stands out (if, for a moment you ignore the priceless descriptor from one journalist saying the victims this time are people with “Netflix accounts”) in multiple media statements is that the victims this time are “civilized”.
This is not new. George Bush repeatedly referred to 9/11 as being an attack on the “civilized world”. Everyone at one point chanted “Je Suis Charlie” and said the “civilized world” would not stand for terrorism, presumably from some sort of “uncivilized world”. The twentieth century had enough clear evidence that Europe and Europeans and whites could barely lay exclusive claim to civilization: it was after all, a century that saw genocides in gas chambers and the almost nonchalant dropping of atomic bombs, apart from the long strangling of entire bodies of population by Communist totalitarian dictators: all white war crimes. The seeds were there of white supremacy: the world, after all, was quite openly divided into three during the Cold War: the First World, comprising the “good rich nations, all white”, the unmentionable “second world, the white but Communist enemies”, and the third world, the rest. The rest were black and brown, whether rich or poor, “developing” or “underdeveloped”.
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In the post-Cold War era, however, capitalism was considered the giant global washing machine, and wherever “proper capitalism” went was considered civilized. Samuel P Huntington helped Europeans resume their obsession with the Civilizing mission – wiping the colonial past of that mission squeaky clean – when he wrote the bestseller “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order” in 1996. The bugle was sounded and found echo in many pundits in the Western media. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, one of the most celebrated champions of globalization and the author of “The World is Flat”, said no two countries which had got their McDonald outlets in the post Cold War era had gone to war. This was the neoliberal paean to Capitalism, the foundation but not yet the final racist version of casual and open populist racism that abounds today.
The racist denouement was not long in coming though. As neoliberal strategy created unprecedented inequality in white nations (and the 2008 financial crisis and how it was dealt with summarised the savagery of that inequality), white politicians found it increasingly opportune to mobilize votes by vociferously blaming “different” people for all ills. This would keep the focus of anger not on the one percent enjoying more than seventy percent, on an average, of national wealth, but on recent arrivals from war-torn nations. Most of the wars the new arrivals were escaping were either started by Western white nations or were being sustained through active material and intelligence interventions of those Western nations.
Here is the thing, though. When Donald Trump called Africa the arsehole of the world or tried to pass bills preventing migration from “uncivilized” countries, his voice represented a racism that isn’t what we see in careless references during the Ukraine war broadcasts. Those are deliberately dumbed-down, in-your-face insults targeting liberals. When a journalist or a panelist from Al Jazeera or the BBC almost casually talks about the victims hailing from “our own civilized world”, they belong to a tribe that might well have criticized Trump over civilized wine and it would be no surprise to know that they decry the naked variety of racism.
This is the variety of racism that has less to do with political mobilization or any recent populist upsurge. It has more to do with something far more endemic: it is the way white people across the world sense the world from birth to death; it has its roots in the white natural sense of what could or ought to happen in the world. That sense shows up when the British Prime Minister repeatedly makes wildly racist dismissive statements about Africans and Muslims, but is finally called to judgement by his electorate only on whether he drank at a party during Covid. It shows up when righteous French intellectuals defend French legislation banning veils or ghettoization in banalites around Paris citing French identity, liberte and egalite be damned.
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Identity is strange. The moral illegitimacy of white supremacy has never been starker thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. The idea of a “European” has never been in greater confusion than now. Brexit, the arrival of Syrian migrants, and the high-handed treatment meted out by Northern European rich nations to relatively less affluent Southern European countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece in the wake of the 2008 crisis have punched irreparable holes in the very concept. Yet, the ingrained, embedded and indeed almost atavistic white instincts lead broadcasters to casually pronounce that war this time is more unacceptable because the victims are white Europeans.
We are living in a world in which violence has freed itself of ideology, said the great German poet and sociologist Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Perhaps, we are living in a world also where the discourse has freed itself similarly from reality.
The reality, inexorable as it is, is that as the triumphal march of Capitalism continues, not only will capital slosh across borders as it has done relentlessly since the end of the Cold War (Fukuyama famously called it The End of History), but so will labour. Labour, in the form of humans of myriad colour, cultures and beliefs will spread in the service of capital just as funds do now. The latent sense of White Supremacy will remain, albeit only in slips of tongues of “civilized” broadcasters.
In that sense, they are already fossils of their own construct of “civilization”.
