Dispatch #162 White Lesbian Age 72 Considers the End of Days for Post-WWII Global Embrace of a Common Humanity Ensured by International Law & Preeminence of Human Rights

Kathleen A. Maloy
Feb 13
4 min read

Updated: Aug 23

February 13th 2025

Day 25 White Supremacist Misogynist Christian Nationalist Regime

973 Days Since SCOTUS Ruled American Women Don’t Have Human Rights

504 Days Since Israel Began Genocidal Assault on Palestinians in Gaza

Pankaj Misha describes what prompted him to write his just published book “The World After Gaza” during his appearance on Democracy Now! 13 February 2025.

Well, you know, I think the primary impulse behind the book was really to put an end to this horrible loneliness that I felt, along with many other people, a kind of desolation induced by the fact that, you know, powerful people, powerful politicians in democracies, journalists, intellectuals were either silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or, even worse, vehemently supporting it.

You know, we also saw a massive global divide open up in the responses to the atrocities in Gaza, with South Africa, country like South Africa, taking the lead in bringing a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. And, of course, we can now see South Africa is being severely punished by Trump and Musk for daring to do this. We saw public opinion in most of the world really shocked and appalled by the disproportionate Israeli response, and at the same time, you know, that public opinion asking questions of Western democracies, like “What happened here? Why are you supporting this endless massacre of thousands and thousands of people?”

[There is….] a vast panorama of violence, disorder and suffering that we’re seeing today. And I think it’s really important not just to think about the past or the history, the larger history, of what is happening in Gaza today, but also about the present. And that is also something I describe in the book, whether Gaza signifies something more than just the latest episode in a long-standing conflict in the Middle East. Does it portend the arrival of far-right, racial supremacist regimes across the Western world? So, I would argue — and I have said this in the book — that we are looking at a far more extensive moral, political and, I would say, intellectual breakdown than we have known, certainly in our own lifetimes. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/13/pankaj_mishra_world_after_gaza

How Gaza Shattered the West’s Mythology. The war has exposed post-World War II illusions of a common humanity. │ Pankaj Mishra│ Foreign Policy│ February 7, 2025.

Much has happened in the world in recent years: natural catastrophes, financial breakdowns, political earthquakes, a global pandemic, and wars of conquest and vengeance. Yet no disaster compares to Gaza—nothing has left us with such an intolerable weight of grief, perplexity, and bad conscience. Nothing has yielded so much shameful evidence of our lack of passion and indignation, narrowness of outlook, and feebleness of thought. A whole generation of young people in the West was pushed into moral adulthood by the words and actions (and inaction) of its elders in politics and journalism, and forced to reckon, almost on its own, with acts of savagery aided by the world’s richest and most powerful democracies.

Biden’s stubborn malice and cruelty to the Palestinians was just one of many gruesome riddles presented by Western politicians and journalists. It would have been easy for Western leaders to withhold unconditional support to an extremist regime in Israel while also acknowledging the necessity of pursuing and bringing to justice those guilty of war crimes on Oct. 7. Why then did Biden repeatedly claim to have seen atrocity videos that do not exist? Why did British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, assert that Israel “has the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinians, and punish those in the Labour Party calling for a cease-fire? Why did Jürgen Habermas, the eloquent champion of the Western Enlightenment, leap to the defense of avowed ethnic cleansers?

What made the Atlantic, one of the oldest periodicals in the United States, publish an article arguing, after the murder of nearly 8,000 children in Gaza, that “it is possible to kill children legally”? What explains the recourse to the passive voice in the mainstream Western media while reporting Israeli atrocities, which made it harder to see who is doing what to whom, and under what circumstances (“The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome” read the headline of a BBC report on Israeli soldiers unleashing an attack dog on a disabled Palestinian)? Why did U.S. billionaires help spur pitiless crackdowns on protesters on college campuses? Why were academics and journalists sacked, artists and thinkers de-platformed, and young people barred from jobs for appearing to defy a pro-Israel consensus? Why did the West, while defending and sheltering Ukrainians from a venomous assault, so pointedly exclude Palestinians from the community of human obligation and responsibility?

Regardless of how we address these questions, they force us to look squarely at the phenomenon we confront: a catastrophe jointly inflicted by Western democracies, which has destroyed the necessary illusion that emerged after the defeat of fascism in 1945 of a common humanity underpinned by respect for human rights and a minimum of legal and political norms. https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/07/pankaj-mishra-world-after-gaza-book-israel-war-global-order-history/