“If nature has seen fit to make us born into the first of these classes of men, it is so that we may enjoy at will the pleasure of enslaving the other and of making them despotically serve all our passions and all our needs.” — Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade [1]
“I do not believe in any rights that are not supported by the power required to enforce them.” — Friedrich Nietzsche [2]
What I named “monstrosity” in my new book[3] was neither a metaphor nor a literary excess nor an apocalyptic imagination. Rather, it was a cold reading of a system already in motion for some time now—a system that would eventually shed all restraint once the masks fell. Gaza in particular and Palestine in general is where that system stopped pretending.
Indeed, the untold horrors we’ve been witnessing since October 7th, 2023, are the logical outcome of a moral architecture that I had strived to dissect years ago, more precisely in two books[4] published in 2014 and 2021: that is, a Western-led global order that divides humanity into lives that must be protected and lives that can be expended; deaths that demand mobilization and deaths that deserve no more and no better than silence.
Nothing that is happening in Palestine was unforeseeable: cemeteries have been bulldozed to retrieve a single Israeli body; human remains exhumed, mixed, and erased—Palestinian deads have thus been desecrated twice; hospitals turned into military targets; entire neighborhoods erased with their inhabitants still inside; children pulled from rubble without heads, without limbs, without names; families starved by design; and aid trucks blocked, delayed, rationed, and weaponized.
These are not “tragic excesses” as often depicted by Western mainstream media. They are documented, repeated, defended, and, worse still, normalized practices. They, among other afflictions, form the monstrosity I spoke of. A cruelty administered with paperwork, death justified with legal language, and annihilation framed as security. A violence so bureaucratic it no longer even needs hatred—it only requires adequate procedure.
And hovering above it all is the alliance that makes it possible. The culprit is not “the West” as a geography, nor Western peoples, but a political-moral bloc—led primarily by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Israel—that has fused power, brute force, selective theology, and self-attributed exceptionalism into a single doctrine, often mislabeled as “Judeo-Christian” civilization and values. This historically unproven, misleading, if not altogether false, doctrine[5] has little to do with faith or humanism and everything to do with civilizational entitlement; hence, the perilous belief that they are the rightful heirs to ancient glories warranting a superior standing in modern geopolitics.
Surely, these are not crusades[6] fought with crosses and swords. They don’t even resemble G.W. Bush’s “crusade”[7] launched in the wake of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. They are “postmodern” crusades waged with drones instead of cavalry, justified by “self-defense” instead of indulgences, salvation, and a “place in Heaven”; sanctified by media narratives instead of priests; and shielded by veto power in the UN Security Council instead of fortresses.
Moreover, what makes this monstrosity unique is not its brutality, not even its sheer savagery—history is replete with episodes that are even worse than this—but its moral insulation. The very same capitals that sanction, lecture, and moralize the world speak of Gaza namelessly or in passive voice: children “die,” hospitals “are hit,” and starvation “occurs.” So much so that responsibility dissolves into grammar and syntax.
Unsurprisingly then, while Western victims are individualized, Palestinian victims are aggregated. And while one Western death always has an identity, a biography, and a story, thousands of Palestinian deaths are dealt with anonymously and reduced to statistics. Likewise, when the “Iranian regime of the Mullahs” is mentioned, outrage is spontaneous and immediate. But when Gaza bleeds, searching for context and mitigating circumstances becomes a prerequisite, a mandatory intellectual and moral requirement.
Before the bombs dropped on Gaza reached their current unprecedented scale in the 21st century, I expressed the fear that the greatest danger of our time would not be violence alone, but violence stripped of moral consequence, one that does not shock, does not end careers, and does not fracture alliances.
As a matter of fact, what is unfolding before our very eyes routinely is not the failure of international law, but its selective suspension; it is not the collapse of humanitarian principles, but their racialized application. It is no wonder that this resonates well with what Chinese President Xi Jinping told his Russian counterpart at the end of his March 2023 visit to Moscow: “Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together,” a deep reflection to which President Vladimir Putin confidently reacted by saying, “I agree.”
Although Gaza is the place where the West proved—beyond reasonable doubt—that its universalism is conditional, such a state of affairs is no novel phenomenon in modern geopolitics. Knowledgeable scholars and thinkers, such as Noam Chomsky[8], Gilbert Achcar[9], and John Mearsheimer[10], have extensively and persuasively theorized this subject. And scores of other no less respected writers have equally convincingly demonstrated—through a long list of examples—how Western foreign policy in general and US interventionism in particular, have, in the words of Sam Smith, led to “an especially well-documented encyclopaedia of malfeasance, mendacity, and mayhem that has been hypocritically carried out in the name of democracy by those whose only true love was power.”
What’s more is that for those major international actors, being a superpower means “never having to say you’re sorry,” as pointed out by William Blum in his famous 2000 book of charges[11], thus confirming what had been said by the likes of former US national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski[12] and George H.W. Bush.[13]
This is why the non-Western world recognizes itself in this tragedy. Not out of ideology, but out of memory, colonial memory in particular. Without a shred of scruple—even less of persuasion—Western narratives relentlessly rehash old tales and arguments, such as suffering is regrettable but necessary, that casualties are unfortunate but strategic, that annihilation can be reasonable if properly explained.
The monstrosity of our century is not only Israeli bombs falling on Gaza. It is the calm, organized, unapologetic Western consent to their falling.
I never pretended to predict the future in my essay—who would dare to? — I simply tried to objectively describe the present world predicament before it was allowed to fully happen. And now that it has arrived, naked and undeniable, the question is no longer whether this global order is failing—but how long the world will continue to accept being ruled by a system that has made mass murder morally affordable.
With such an overarching objective in the context of a disorienting geopolitical landscape, I attempted to approach world affairs beyond ideological or nationalistic frameworks, mainly by drawing inspiration from the likes of Malek Bennabi’s reflections on civilization and moral consciousness and engaging with Western philosophy and political ideas—from Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky to Hannah Arendt and Francis Fukuyama. For I believe that the mission of the intellectual is not to produce sterile academic discourse but to generate ideas, seek truth and justice and expose lies and deceit—and thought, in this view, far from being a luxury, ought to be a moral act of resistance against human degeneration.
The only true hope left, it seems, lies in the urgent realization by international public opinion in general, and that of the Western world in particular, that most of the establishment of their new populist, colonialist and imperialist rulers is hurtling the planet, at a forced and frenzied pace, toward the unknown, uncertainty, and widespread instability. This, most likely, is the best chance to cultivate a mindset of living together in peace[14] and the last bulwark against the chaos and brutalization of the world.
[1] Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, “L’Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice” (Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded), published in Paris, France, in 1797–1801.
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values,” edited by Dr. Oscar Levy, T.N. Foulis, Edinburgh and London, 1914.
[3] Amir Nour, “The Monstrosity of Our Century: The War on Palestine and the Last Western Man,” Clarity Press Inc., Georgia, USA, 2026.
[4] Amir Nour, “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (The Orient and the Occident in Time of a New Sykes-Picot), 2014, and “L’Islam et l’ordre du monde” (Islam and the Order of the World), 2021, both published by Alem El Afkar, Algiers.
[5] Read in particular: Richard Bulliet, “The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization,” Columbia University Press, 2006, and Sophie Bessis, “La civilisation judéo-chrétienne: Anatomie d’une imposture” (Judeo-Christian Civilization: Anatomy of a Sham), Les Liens qui Libèrent, Paris, France, 2025.
[6] Historians count seven or eight Crusades, launched against Muslims for control of what Christians called the “Holy Land,” between 1096 and 1291.
[7] When President G. W. Bush declared, “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient,” his spokesperson quickly disavowed the inadvertent use of the term “crusade.” (See: The White House, “Remarks by the President Upon Arrival,” Office of the Press Secretary, September 16, 2001). Nevertheless, as James Carroll rightly pointed out in his book “Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War,” far from being “a long-ago history that we can blithely abjure, the Crusades created a state of consciousness that still shapes the mind of the West, and if Americans don’t know that, many Muslims do.”
[8] Noam Chomsky stated that “If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke (…) The profession of dedication to rights is always tinged with a fundamental hypocrisy: rights if we want them, not if we don’t (…) It’s pretty well-established over many decades that the United States supports democracy only if it accords with strategic and economic objectives. Otherwise it opposes it.”
[9] Gilbert Achcar points out that “These actions, and the Western response, illustrate all too clearly the amalgam of savage cruelty, self-righteousness, and injured innocence that is so deeply rooted in the imperial mentality as to be beyond awareness.” (See Noam Chomsky & Gilbert Achcar, “Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy,” Penguin Books, 2007.
[10] Analyzing “offensive realism” in his definitive work laid out in “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics” (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2001), John Mearsheimer writes, “Despite the U.S. commitment to spreading democracy across the globe, it helped overthrow democratically elected governments and embraced a number of authoritarian regimes.” He also quoted Franklin Roosevelt as saying, “I can’t take communism, but to defeat Hitler I would hold hands with the Devil.”
[11] William Blum, “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” Zed Books, London, 2000.
[12] In a 1988 interview in the French magazine “Le Nouvel Observateur,” Brzezinski admitted that the official story that the US gave military aid to the Afghanistan opposition only after the Soviet invasion in 1979 was a lie. And when asked whether he regretted this decision, he responded, “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War (…) a conflict that brought about demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”
[13] Speaking as vice president within the administration of President Ronald Reagan in the context of the shooting of an Iranian passenger plane by an American ship, taking 290 lives, Bush said, “I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are,” Newsweek, August 15, 1988.
[14] At the initiative of Algeria and other like-minded countries, the UN General-Assembly, in its resolution 72/130 adopted on December 8, 2017, declared 16 May the “International Day of Living Together in Peace”. It is an annual international celebration held on May 16 to promote peace, tolerance, inclusivity, understanding, and solidarity. It aims to encourage individuals, communities, and countries to live together in harmony and to celebrate the diversity that exists in the world, through various cultural and artistic activities, diplomatic efforts, and international engagements.
