The utter failure of western morality
Disclosure: Lack of space forces a certain amount of generalisation.
The moral crime of the silent majority in what is called "the West" is to remain silent in the face of the genocide in the Gaza Strip – a genocide by Zionist Israel facilitated and supported by the United States, EU members, Australia, New Zealand and other nations.
Before the whiteness outrage bubbles over, remember four pertinent facts: Israel is ruled by a Zionist coalition with a political project; Palestinians and Jews from the Middle East are both Semite peoples; "anti-semitism" is not an anti-Jewish attribution that can be applied to anyone expressing support for Palestine; and this conflict has little to do with religion, it actually is about land and political and economic rights.
Meanwhile, let's not forget to call a hammer a hammer: the utterly barbaric, incessant and overwhelming Israeli bombardment of what has been called the "concentration camp" of Gaza and the Palestinian people over the past 19 months has been called a genocide by many legal experts, UN personnel (some of whom resigned in protest) and millions, yes, millions, of ordinary citizens protesting around the world.
Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, shocking the Israeli nation and the world. It was not, as Western media described it, an “unprovoked attack” – it was a desperate attempt to put Palestine back on the global agenda after decades of attrition by Zionist military and settler aggression.
Despite a massive propaganda campaign by Israel and Western media (which included claims of rape and beheading of babies) no independent verification of forensic evidence has ever been unambiguously presented and most of those claims were discredited.
Israel said 1400 had been killed, but had to later revise the death count down to 1175, 379 of whom were security force personnel and 36 children. More than 3 400 were wounded and at least 247 soldiers and civilians were taken hostage. It later emerged that many of the deaths were the result of “friendly fire” by Israeli helicopter missiles and gunfire and tank shells, an example being that around 70 burnt-out vehicles on roads leading to Gaza had been fired on by helicopters or tanks (not within the ambit of Hamas firepower). Helicopter crews initially poured down fire at a tremendous rate, attacking about 300 targets in four hours.
The carefully planned Hamas assault precipitated a hugely disproportional response.
The international response was mixed: At least 44 nations denounced Hamas and explicitly condemned it as terrorism, including a joint statement by the US, the UK, France, Italy and Germany. Arab and Muslim countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Iran and Iraq blamed Israel's policy of occupying the Palestinians.
The UAE, Bahrain, and China amended their initial declarations to expressly denounce the killing and abduction of Israeli civilians. A poll by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy between 14 November and 6 December 2023 found 95% of Saudis did not believe that Hamas had killed civilians.1
The death toll in Gaza since 7 October 2023 stands currently at 53 655 killed, 121 950 injured out of a Gaza population of 2.1m.2 Of those 15 613 are children (825 under 12 months, and 274 killed shortly after birth), 8 304 are women and 3 839 are elderly. An estimated 7 000 (including 5 000 children) or more are believed to be buried under rubble.
Stop. Just read that again. Think about it.
In the West Bank, UNRWA reported on 9 May 2025 that 926 Palestinians, including at least 196 children, had been killed, including in East Jerusalem. The occupying Zionist forces have forced displacement, demolished and destroyed Palestinian houses for more than 100 days since their operation began on 21 January 2025. They have illegally closed schools and entered UN offices deemed to be inviolable spaces.3
Humanitarian aid has not entered Gaza since 9 March 2025. Food, fuel, medical supplies, vaccines are running out, impacting the most vulnerable groups such as children, women and the elderly. Escalated violence by bombardments, missile strikes, air attacks and snipers have caused thousands more casualties, even telling Palestinians to move to certain areas and then killing them there.
It has become a death run to try and obtain the “aid” being delivered by the US/Zionist-controlled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). People have been shot dead as they struggled to get food, claims the Israeli military, of course, has denied. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.
And yet the “civilised world” of the West remains silent.
More than 95% of schools in Gaza have been damaged, with nearly 90% requiring full reconstruction or rehabilitation (one third of them UNRWA schools). More than 9 000 children have been admitted for treatment of acute malnutrition. More than 75% of interviewed households report worsening water situations, with 90% facing water insecurity. Nearly half a million people have been displaced since the Israel smashed the Ceasefire, with at least 1.9m people or 90% of the population having been displaced.4
“The man-made and politically motivated starvation in Gaza is an expression of absolute cruelty. It cannot be addressed by weaponising humanitarian assistance.” – Tweet from Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner-General
Since 7 October, at least 430 aid workers, including 305 UN staff, have been killed. This includes 151 female and 276 male aid workers, as of the end of April 2025. Moreover, MoH has reported that more than 1,400 healthcare workers have been killed.
Between 7 October 2023 and 7 May 2025, the WHO documented 686 health attacks in the Gaza Strip, affecting 122 health facilities and 180 ambulances. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that the number of sheep is down to 36%, goats to 39%, cattle to 3.8%, layers and broilers to 1.4%, and working animals to 79.5%. Following the ban on all humanitarian and commercial supplies on 2 March, an additional 20-30% of livestock is predicted to have perished5.
The situation is increasingly dire, and the “civilised” world continues to stand silent.
More journalists have been killed by Israel in the past 19 months that the accumulated total of the US Civil War, WW I, WW II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Yugoslav Wars, Afghanistan War and the Ukraine War COMBINED. Deaths total more than 220. It is clear Israel does not want the images and stories to get out. They target journalists individually with missiles or snipers.
As Gaza entered the 600th day of destruction, the USA completed the 800th delivery of bombs and ammunitions via air force flights. Despite their protestations, the USA continues to support this genocide 100%.
At least 23 hospitals have been bombed out of service, more than 1.9m people have been displaced. Using old statistics, infrastructural damage has been immense: 100 schools, 183 mosques, 3 churches, and more than 1500 infrastructural facilities destroyed. All bakeries are gone, 65 sewerage pump stations are damaged and more than 126 government buildings damaged.
Israel controls all borders and infrastructure to Gaza. The Zionists cut off all fuel, water, food and aid. The population of Gaza has not only suffered unjust bombardments by a major Middle-Eastern military power, they have been refused any humanitarian help. The stated aim of Israel is to exterminate the Palestinians, including their history and culture. (The REAL Israeli Agenda Pt 1 of 3)
Israel has dropped more than 80 000 TONS of explosives on Gaza, and fired more than 100 000 artillery shells at defenceless people. More shells are coming from the USA.
Let's be clear – both Israeli and Hamas atrocities must be condemned. Any attack on unarmed civilians is illegal in terms of the Geneva Convention. But the laws governing warfare (and there are many of them) are quite clear than responses must be "proportionate". Definitions of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" are also clear.
If it is possible to take emotion out of this equation, and this article, then we need to acknowledge that:
1. In war, truth is the first casualty;
2. War crimes will be committed by both sides – always;
3. There are no winners in war, only casualties;
4. Both sides will use propaganda, lots of it;
5. Middlemen and arms dealers both profit from war;
6. Most wars are fought for economic reasons;
7. Every war has refugees – lots of them.
How did we get here? The silence is unnerving.
Simplified for brevity, the Russian Revolution (1905-1917) put the fear of God into European, British and American power-brokers. Communism was a new political ideology with an economic analysis (Marx et al) that endangered capitalism. It had to be destroyed at all costs.
Churchill, that British "hero" of the South African War and WW II (he was demoted after WW I and the 1915 Gallipoli fiasco [56 000 dead]), was no hero — he was a racist imperialist who loved violence.
Churchill, described as having "blood dripping from his mouth", and stalking down the corridors of endless power, is legendary for having fought in India, Sudan, South Africa, helping the Spanish suppress Cuba's freedom fighters, while writing about the dangers of "international Jews" (i.e. communists) and their "sinister confederacy" against whom he invoked the far more acceptable "National Jew" (Zionism).
He advocated intervention to quell the Russian revolution, compared Palestinian self-determination to the dog running its own manger: "I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia . . . by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race . . . has come in and taken its place.”
In 1922, Churchill called socialism "barbarism" and "slavery", the "rule of the few made absolute over the wishes of the many". He might have been speaking for the current 1% of ultra-wealthy capitalists who rule the world today.
In a great irony, he claimed the socialist elite “sit high above the masses, ruling their lives, and appointing their toil as if they were gods in heaven.” He called socialists in power a “sort of priesthood, with a caucus below them for rigging . . . elections.” Sounds just like today's "western democracies".
He called Lenin’s rule a “foul combination of criminality and animalism,” and feared the "Bolshevik pestilence" would overcome Germany. He called Mussolini "a good ruler", and saw fascism as a barrier against communism. He claimed the Bolsheviks sought to destroy capital, exterminate religious belief and were fanatical in opposition to "civilisation".
He openly called Ghandi a "half-naked fakir" who should be murdered by being "bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant" – after which he oversaw the starvation of at least two million Indians in Bengal during WW II. In March 1946, Churchill made his “iron curtain” speech heralding the Cold War.
Churchill, and his imperialist compatriots responsible for the partition of Palestine in 1948 and the resultant "Nakba" or "Catastrophe", as Zionists violently expelled Palestinians from their homes, was a violent man who sent troops in to attack striking miners, deliberately allowed Latvian anarchists to be burnt to death in a house, and was against the Suffragettes, the Irish struggles for home rule, and "international Jews".
The focus on Churchill is because, as Britain's favourite son and last truly loved leader, Britain is responsible for:
1. The first concentration camps (in the South African War) and the “scorched earth” policy
2. The first nation to carpet-bomb civilian targets during WW II (Dresden, Munich, Berlin)
3. The partition of Ireland and the subsequent civil war
4. The 1948 division of Palestine leading to the current situation and genocide
5. The first state to use Agent Orange and saturation bombing (later followed by the USA in Vietnam)
6. The barbarism enacted against the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya and many other more recent atrocities globally, including support for Zelensky and his Ukrainian armed forces.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union shortly afterwards, the western powers rejected Russia's friendly overtures and began aggressively to expand NATO to the countries that bordered Russia.
Flush with their "success" of "defeating communism" (as the USA called it) the US began to expand its influence as the bully-boy of the world and their policy of “perpetual war”.
This led eventually to the "colour revolutions" in Georgia, Libya, Moldova, and Lebanon, and then the armed coup d'etat in Ukraine in 2014.
Assistant Secretary of State for European/Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, the donut-bearing "Maiden of Maidan", revealed to the US Congress that it had cost $5-billion to wrest control of Ukraine from Russian influence after the USSR collapse. Recent CIA disclosures appear to show the price tag was much, much higher.
The recent war debts of USD119-billion6 that Joe Biden recklessly ran up to sustain the war effort to "destroy Russia and Putin" show just how important Ukraine's riches are. Trump initially demanded a USD500-bn share of Ukraine’s rare earths and other strategic minerals but walked it back to let Ukraine off having to repay the debt and signed a deal that gives US preferential rights to mineral extraction.7 In December 2013 US interference saw the democratically elected Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych flee assassins as US-backed anti-semetic and anti-communist nationalist and fascist groups such as Right Sector, the Azov Battalion, the Organisation of Ukraine Nationalists (OUN), Svoboda Party, and others manipulated the pro-EU protests on the Maidan Square into a second Ukrainian “colour revolution” (the first was in 2004).
This "revolution" (coup) was initiated by nationalist fascists, poor economic conditions and the promise of EU prosperity. With CIA help (now outsourced to the National Endowment for Democracy or NED), and the connivance of politicians and armed militias, the eternally divided country of Ukraine, sandwiched between Europe's east and Asia's west, became a contested space for economic opportunity and capitalist greed.
US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt and Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State discussed in a recorded conversation the proposed regime change in Ukraine. Nuland told Pyatt: "Fuck the EU". The police were provoked, and fascist snipers and agent provocateurs began the violence that subsequently engulfed the Maidan.
Party to the coup were US funders such as the Soros Foundation, NGOs, and politicians such as John McCain, Joe Biden and Nuland, who handed out donuts on the Maidan while accusing the cops of abuse. America's use of propaganda techniques and psych-ops was dramatically exhibited in Ukraine, where by February 2014 the protests morphed into real violence with snipers killing 20 police officers, and molotov cocktails burning people alive.
EU leaders failed to produce a lasting truce, and Yanukovych fled to Russia. Illegally, the US government recognised the new regime, but Crimea broke away to join Russia after a referendum with a 96% poll victory, and the Donbass region (a Russian-speaking area) began to resist, leading to a 11-year-long civil war with the fascist rulers who had outlawed Russian as a language and committed atrocities such as shelling civilians with artillery.
The recent history of Ukraine is a litany of provocations and failures by the west to heed the warnings from Russia that their red lines were being crossed as NATO broke pre- and post-Warsaw Pact agreements by expanding into 13 territories near Russia (NATO spends 20x what Russia spends on its military). In 2023, former French president Francois Hollande and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel revealed that the EU had never intended the 2014 Minsk Agreements to restore peace in Ukraine; they were just a ruse to buy Ukraine time to upgrade military equipment and training from NATO to take on Russia.
This kind of vicious betrayal is what the USA particularly, is known for. As former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously said in 1968: “it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal”. He also said: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests” and jokingly, “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”8 Or one can look at how the US abruptly left Vietnam and Afghanistan to see how little they care for morality or people of colour.
The USA and Britain are the foremost arms manufacturers, so they profit from war. The US has been fighting almost continuously in one arena or another, or arming other countries, since the end of WW II. US military spending last year was USD778-Billion, far ahead of its nearest rivals, China with USD252-billion, India with USD72-billion, Russia USD61.7bn, the UK with USD59.28bn and Saudi Arabia with |||USD57.5bn.
Lockheed Martin (US) is the largest arms manufacturer with USD39.6bn revenue in 2024, followed by RTX Corporation (US) USD59.4bn, Northrop Grumman Corp (US) with USD32.3bn, Boeing (US) USD29.3bn, General Dynamics Corp (US) USD28.3bn, BAE Systems (UK) USD26.9bn, Norinco (China) USD22.1bn, AVIC (China) USD20.6bn, CASC (China) USD19.6bn, Rostec (Russia) USD16.8bn. Arms are one of the most lucrative commodities in the world, and is totally dominated by the US with China rising.9
As award-winning Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy says: "Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons."
It is the greed of capitalists and people across the world, the desire for wealth, for power that drives the moral failure that plagues us, especially the West, where the accumulation of wealth is the ultimate prize, the high altar. Money worship, the worship of the wealthy, the rich and famous, the celebs who attend gala dinners in exorbitantly expensive clothes while children and women are bombed by weapons supplied by their own governments.
The shocking silence of the world reveals the "rules-based international order" which the US demands we all live by. Of course, that exempts America and its allies, in particular, Zionist Israel and its settlers.
The German-born American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt said: “The death of human empathy is one the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”10 It seems clear that the governments of the so-called West has gone beyond this point already. Albert Einstein put it differently: “ The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”11
1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks
2https://gisha.org/en/the-humanitarian-catastrophe-in-gaza-facts-and-figures/ quoting Palestinian Ministry of Health and UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) running updates as of 21 May 2025.
3https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-170-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem
4Ibid.
5https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-288-gaza-strip
6https://nypost.com/2025/02/25/world-news/ukraine-war-has-cost-280-billion-whos-paying-the-most/
7https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/world/what-we-know-about-trumps-ukraine-mineral-deal-intl
8https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/56470/did-henry-kissinger-say-it-may-be-dangerous-to-be-americas-enemy-but-to-be-am
9https://247wallst.com/military/2024/10/12/the-largest-arms-manufacturers-in-the-world/ using stats from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
10https://library.fairmontstate.edu/news/1/Hannah-Arendt