This three-part essay looks at systemic phenomena which represent a turning point in the adolescence of human collective consciousness.
Part one looks at how the killing of civilians in Israel and Palestine should force dominant Western powers to fully integrate the values modern democracy is founded on.
Part two looks beyond the moral realm at how a denial of democratic responsibility is undermining the Western social contract.
Part three looks at the challenges faced by a globalised world, and the need for a maturation towards greater individual and collective responsibility.
by Alex Ray
In November 2023, controversy arose when young social media personalities took the time to read, analyse and discuss Osama Bin Laden’s November 2002 Letter to America in the context of Israel’s war on Palestinians. There was a concerted attempt to stamp out any discussion of the meaning of the letter on platforms such as TikTok. As a result, Western citizens will likely remain unaware of the underpinnings of Bin Laden’s thinking and attempted justification for killing civilians in the USA on September 11, 2001. That is the point of censorship after all.
Bin Laden’s letter focused on the ongoing colonial oppression of Palestine, among other primarily moral transgressions. It used the core logic of democratic and personal responsibility to justify killing civilians – i.e. citizens in a democracy should be actively responsible for what their government does on their behalf. Shocking as the example may be, the responsibility we take for our actions on both an individual and collective level is at the heart of social cohesion, collective morality, and our justice system. It is exactly the growing Western phenomena of avoiding responsibility and claiming victimhood status which is engendering dangerous social blindness, and undermining the positive contributions of Western culture to the modern world.
Since the end of the Second World War, the Western cultural narrative has primarily distinguished itself on the principle of democracy – meaning governments elected by their peoples to enact policies on their behalf, or rather in the national interest. The West juxtaposes and champions this democratic social contract against ‘other’ societies with systems of government based on different social contracts.
Western narratives crafted by political and propaganda systems position Western democracy as a system based on ‘the freedom to choose’, and as morally superior to governments variously labelled as dictatorships, regimes, and autocracies where it is implied the population lacks choice – regardless of whether a popular vote brought the leadership to power or not.
The primary implication is that citizens of other (“inferior”) systems have had their freedom to choose removed by the top-down imposition of power. A further implication is that the state and its leaders do not act in the interests of the population in the way that democratic leaders promise to do. Evidence of this is seen in the way Western governments frequently resort to a narrative of the need to restore ‘democratic choice’ as justification for intervening in the internal affairs of other nations.
One way of viewing the blueprint of this narrative is that in enemy societies, the ruling class projects power downwards – via an ‘Iron Fist’ – while those in democracies project power upwards through their choice of leaders. Bin Laden followed this logic to present a case based entirely on the West’s own standards – that the actions of the United States government in the world are a representation of the people’s will, with their active choice and consent. The citizens in a democracy are responsible for what their governments do – i.e. through both their power to choose and their power to oppose, they are not blameless victims, according to Bin Laden.
“…You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:
(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, … The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want …”
1
Real acceptance of this logic in practice requires a much more radical engagement with democracy than has ever existed in the West, with considerable psycho-social implications for the way we really operate.
In an individual life, healthy learning and growth requires we face moments of uncomfortable introspection when considering our responsibility for an outcome. The same applies to the collective consciousness. Western populations – living under the rhetorical model of democracy – would face huge levels of shame, guilt, and moral dissonance if they were to take real responsibility for what governments do on their behalf around the world.
If we regard the modern ‘democratic era’ as roughly emerging in the 19th century, the list of reprehensible actions by democracies would include slavery and genocide on multiple continents, not to mention violence done to the non-human world. Osama bin Laden also included environmental crimes in his reasons for seeking the destruction of the United States.
The gap between rhetorical democratic responsibility and actual democratic responsibility is more than a ‘shortfall’ however. Instead of citizens assuming responsibility, Western democracies have operated largely as a way of citizens abrogating responsibility for the exploits of their governments. Western societies also prioritise the value of material living standards and success. Western populations thus largely remained passive and happy to turn a blind eye to the actions of their governments abroad as long as material living standards do not decline beyond a relatively increasing standard.
At the opposite end of the spectrum to radical democratic responsibility – and a few steps beyond abrogated responsibility – is the victim mindset. This mindset denies responsibility, blame others for events, and blinds itself to external realities and the experiences of others. Casual and professional cultural observers recognise that widespread retreat into victimhood is becoming a real problem in the West.
Doctor of psychology Rahav Gabray explains that evidence shows feeling like a victim is associated with dwelling on negative feelings for longer; feeling more self-absorbed and less open to other people’s experiences; being less ready to assume responsibility for harms you cause; and being quicker to seek revenge. Those are serious downsides.
Feeling like a victim even helps people to commit atrocities. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister reports in his book ‘Evil’ that torturers and murderers regularly justify their actions by framing themselves as victims. Even entire countries tell stories about how they’re morally righteous victims. These stories can be passed on, upholding violence and bitterness for generations.
Shared-victimhood identity within groups is based on what psychiatrist and conflict mediator Vamik Volkan calls “chosen traumas.” Media, elites, and others in the population choose which traumas and grievances to raise and hold onto and which aspects of history to ignore or downplay. This is a shaping of collective memory. The result can be huge groups of people feeling like morally superior victims, whether or not this is justified.
– Matthew Legge, Psychology Today, February 10, 2022
Since 2001, U.S. and Western victimhood and ensuing exceptionalism has prevented even well-intentioned analysts from comprehending the real call to responsibility in Bin Laden’s letter. Writing for The Atlantic about the 75% civilian death toll in Israel’s 2014 attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, Conor Friedersdorf reminded Western audiences of their need to maintain the moral high-ground against ‘terrorist’ enemies by not justifying the killing of civilians simply by their proximity to, or complicity with, militants.
Countering some of the most extreme Israeli vitriol against Palestinians – expressed by New York University’s Thane Rosenbaum, in the Wall Street Journal – Friedersdorf argued Israel must not submit to the logic and morals of ‘terrorists’ and instead must fight with the [superior] logic and morals of the West.
“because wide embrace of Rosenbaum’s logic would be a setback for a world where civilians have legal protection in war, however often it is violated… Rosenbaum’s argument is extremely similar to the justifications that terrorist groups use when they target civilians in their own attacks.”
It is based on the false assumption that there are no real innocents or bystanders in a given country because of their previous political support for a government and its policies, which supposedly makes it permissible to strike non-military targets.”
Referring to Bin Laden’s 2002 letter, Friedersdorf omits that the “justifications that terrorist groups use” only work when applied to democracies. The logic fails when applying those same justifications to a society without active choice, as all of the West’s enemies are cast to be.
Thus, Israeli or other Western government killing of civilians goes beyond embracing terrorist logic, as Bin Laden’s logic requires a population to actively choose the committers of violence as their representatives. The consistency of Western claims to moral superiority also puts the onus for higher moral standards on Western populations before others.
In this light, those wishing to dismiss Bin Laden’s argument as unacceptable no matter the logic would do well to note the moral and intellectual efforts Bin Laden made to justify his killing of civilians – as opposed to Western governments’ justifications of “unfortunate collateral damage” which is code for ‘they were in the way’.
Reminding us that the core justification of the Western narrative is of moral superiority, Friedersdorf urges the audience to remember “the [our] civilizational taboo against killing civilians”. Friedersdorf provides no evidence for the application of this taboo at any point in Western civilisational history, least so in the slave trade and conquest of the Americas – two processes which defined the development of the modern West.
As one of the West’s most prominent “common sense” voices, Joe Rogan pointed out in conversation with Russel Brand “…to say that they [political and corporate elites] wouldn’t do that [profit from chaos, death, and destruction] because they value human life and morals and ethics over profit – that’s never been exhibited, that’s not a true statement. The opposite is true and provable.”
And while a taboo against killing civilians may exist in religious texts or international conventions on warfare, what good is a civilisational or individual value if it remains only words on paper?
Fiedersdorf eventually reveals his own Western-superiority double standard:
“After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden argued that Al Qaeda was perfectly justified in killing all those people inside the World Trade Center because they weren’t really civilians – they were complicit in U.S. might and misdeeds. Didn’t their taxes fund America’s CIA assassinations and war planes?
As every American understood perfectly well at the time, the attack that day would not have been justified even if all office workers in the Twin Towers had voted for a president and supported a military that perpetrated grave sins in the Middle East. Or even, indeed, if they were all subletting spare bedrooms to U.S. soldiers.”
In other words – even if the killing of civilians in the Middle East was the correct application of the will of a given population, it is not justified to kill the civilians of the that population in the same way.
This indefensible logic aside, Freidersdorf misses the core of Bin Laden’s argument. Bin Laden did not care about correctly labelling someone as ‘really a civilian’ or not, he cared about holding civilians responsible for their choices.
Paying taxes in support of wars and participating in the American military through enrolment were points b) and c) of Bin Laden’s justification letter. Point a) was about public choice over democratic government policies and either consent for, or at minimum no real objection toward them.
Israeli colonial-settler ideology [Zionism] represents the most concentrated current manifestation of the contradictions inherent in the denial of responsibility and double standard victimhood. Zionist commentator Ben Shapiro provides endless examples.
Shapiro claims that the main reason Osama bin Laden’s letter found popularity amongst youth in November 2023, was because the education system had taught children that “the West is inherently evil or at the very least morally equivalent with terrorism.” Shapiro implies the West must be morally superior to others, but offers no proof that it is.
Instead, Shapiro claims that youths side with Bin Laden because they can only frame morality in terms of oppressed v oppressors [i.e. victims and perpetrators]. Shapiro continues to read sections of Bin Laden’s letter, stopping to mock Bin Laden for being a ‘victim’ and obsessing on the “oppressed/oppressor matrix” which he frames as a leftist mind virus. The fact that modern western democracy sprung from a narrative of freedom from oppression is lost in Shapiro’s contortions to claim his own [collective Zionist] victimhood – which fits the hallmarks of the psychological framework above by both claiming ultimate victimhood as a Zionist and denying anyone else victimhood status.
Both leading Israeli journalist Gideon Levy and trauma therapist Gabor Mate – who’s Hungarian Jewish parents narrowly escaped the holocaust and was a young Zionist – have spoken at length about the venomous nature of Zionist victimhood.
Speaking in 2015 Levy said:
Israeli society has surrounded itself by shields, walls, not only physical but mental walls…. I’ll give you the three principles which enable us to live so easily with this brutal reality:
a) Most Israeli’s, if not all of them deeply, believe that we are the chosen people and if we are the chosen people we have the right to do whatever we want…
b) There was never an occupation in history where the occupier painted himself as the victim, not only a victim, but the only victim around. This also enables any Israeli to live in peace, because we are the victims.
c) this is perhaps the most crucial one and the worst one … that is the systematic dehumanisation of the Palestinians, which enables us to live in peace with everything. Because if they are not human beings like us then there is not really a question of human rights. And if you scratch under the skin of almost every Israeli you will find it there. Almost no one will treat the Palestinians like human beings like us.
Levy’s last point explains why Western democracies need to justify their actions morally, no matter how many contortions or outright lies it takes?
The answer – until the October 2023 conflict in Gaza – was humanity. The idea that all individuals are equal in their existence as humans – a ‘world-centric’ concept – is also embedded within the post-colonial conception of democracy in its stage of universal suffrage and human rights. Indeed, developing into this stage was one of the primary ways Western democracies sought to excuse themselves for the crimes of the colonial and slavery eras. This makes it morally and psychologically difficult for Westerners to admit they still see themselves as better than, or deserving different treatment to others, and that they are comfortable brutalising other humans.
Evidence of the development of this shift can been seen in colonial vs post-colonial propaganda systems. Where Western media once connected with domestic audiences by unashamedly labelling the colonised as savages, post-colonial propaganda relies on subtle tricks of language to dehumanise – Palestinians are not killed, they simply die. In the first two weeks of Israel’s 2023 Gaza assault, Reuters set farcical new standards in denying responsibility through passive voice by titling an article on the killing of its own journalist Issam Abdallah in Southern Lebanon “Reuters journalist killed in Lebanon in missile fire from direction of Israel”.
The modern indirect approach to propaganda facilitates the Western public’s belief in the post-colonial self-conception of democracy – that all individuals are equal in their existence and rights – while avoiding the reality that the Western approach to the rest of the world maintains the missionary spirit of ‘we will teach you how to live better – like us’ and ‘do as we say, not as we do’.
The November 2023 Tik-Tok saga over Bin Laden’s letter however represent an early example of moral dissonance against the degradation of Western self-concept on a moral level – to date this form of criticism has largely remained economic. Impressionable youth are not the only ones starting to face harsh realities. CNN news host Wolf Blitzer – who previously worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) –also publicly challenged an Israeli military spokesperson on the morality of their decision to bomb a heavily populated refugee camp to kill just one Hamas commander.
Israel’s attempt to place itself within this post-colonial Western socio-cultural conception has only ever succeeded through its claim to be the same type of democracy. However Israel is not a post-colonial state. It is an active colonial state, and the morality of Zionism still conforms to the late 19th Century European colonial context in which it originated. Zionists treat Christian and Muslim Arabs, as well as non-Western Jews in Israel, as inferior. This tendency is given legal basis in the 2018 ‘Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People’ and official policies that apportion citizens’ rights based on religion.
“Israel accords Palestinians a different package of rights in every one of these units – all of which are inferior compared to the rights afforded to Jewish citizens. The goal of Jewish supremacy is advanced differently in every unit …”
– B’Tselem ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid’, 12 January 2021
This places Israel – a fundamentally ethnocentric state – as a moral outlier within the Western world-centric concept of human equality. Yet the consistent support of Western governments and special interest groups for Israel since 1916 has tied the West to Israel as moral equal and indicates that the West never really integrated the moral values it bases its superiority on. In developmental psychology this can be seen as the power structures of the West never fully progressing beyond ethnocentric consciousness into true world-centric consciousness – a crucial concept which I will return to in part three of this piece.
The double standards of victimhood mentality and denial of responsibility are not conducive to cooperative relationships nor credibility. It also blinds the ‘victim’ to the reality of how others view them. This explains how Israelis cannot contemplate why Palestinians would want to kill them, or why Americans are so easily sold on ‘they hate us for our freedom.’
Until recently the West’s position of global power meant the disgruntlements of brutalised brown populations were still not of much concern. However, the problem for the West really is that the dynamics of denying responsibility also apply to domestic affairs in Western democracies, and that is threatening the stability of the Western social contract. Part two explores how.
Osama Bin Laden’s letter is published in full in a separate post.
Between Deserts 