How Gaza Exposed the Oxymoron of Western Values and Human Rights.
The genocide in Gaza has torn off the West’s human rights mask. This naked colonial violence demands a new path where rights are won through people’s struggle, not granted by the very states that deny them.
The notion that the “West,” responsible for the most horrific crimes in the annals of human history, could somehow be associated with the defense of something they called human rights was always an obscene proposition. But with the assistance of the human rights industry, which is infused with Eurocentrism and white saviorism, the collective West was given ideological cover to continue its project of racist plunder and colonial fascism after fascist forces were partially defeated in Europe with the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.
Outside of Europe, in the colonized world where fascism was originally born and practiced as a value extraction process that materially created the “West,” colonial fascism continued but was given a new face and tagline. Savage repression and predatory colonial/capitalist relations was said to be “advancing democracy” and bringing “development.” To advance democracy and development, the colonial relations that weakened during the world war had to be reestablished for the good of the natives.
Millions were murdered from Algeria and South Korea to Vietnam, Indonesia, Southern Africa, Central America – the list goes on – all in the name of a false universalism that sought to obscure the ongoing crimes against humanity that fueled U.S./Western dominance as benevolence.
But that veneer of respectability, of a delusionary belief that the Western white male had an inevitable right to rule and that all challengers to that rule represented dark forces that had to be smashed by the godly defenders of humanity, finally died in Gaza.
The lurid savagery livestreamed to the world of Israel, with an almost lustful efficiency to destroy and erase the indigenous people of Palestine, revealed for all to see, the true nature of the Western project that began in 1492. The Palestinians burnt alive, the sexual assaults, bombings, systematic torture, starvation, ecocide, and genocide carried out with the direct support of Western nations led by the U.S., graphically brought to life the story of how the West became the West.
Colonial fascism from mercantilism to the parasitic colonial/capitalist super-exploitation of the global South in its contemporary form, provided the material basis for the development of the West and underdevelopment of everyone else. In those relationships of value extraction and control, there was never any space for consideration of human rights.
The humans in these degraded nations never had any rights that the colonists had to recognize. Gaza, and the failure to stop the genocide of Palestinians reaffirmed the naturalization of this form of domination and degradation and the complete absence of any protection of fundamental human rights by the international community – international community, meaning the West. And every human rights innovation only provided new tools for domination. The Western human rights industry created the gift of humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect that Western states then weaponized to obfuscate imperialist subversion of enemy states, peoples, and movements.
A similar example of lawlessness resulting in the deaths of human beings and the potential death of many more is unfolding off the coast of Venezuela where in a blatant example of international gangsterism, the U.S. has assembled a military force that is engaged in systematic murder and preparing for an even larger scale unlawful attack on the state and people of Venezuela.
Where are the human rights of those individuals in the fishing boats being blown to bits and the thousands who will be murdered by the U.S. if it goes through with its attack?
There are no human rights because the idea of human rights was debased from its beginning by a truncated liberalism that differentiated the value of human beings and even created categories of non-humans. That contradiction in the thought and practice of classical liberals allowed the writers of the Declaration of Independence in the U.S. to declare that “all men are created equal” while all of these bourgeois revolutionaries owned and traded slaves and for Israel to claim that it is a democracy – and to have that outrageous claim accepted in the West.
The irreversibility of the colonial/capitalist contradiction that intensified in 2008 created the foundation for the reintroduction of fascism in the capitalist core nations
The bipartisan arrogance of the short period of U.S. unipolarity as a result of the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, the fantasies of the “project for a new American century,” and further retrenchment of capitalist neoliberalism, created the economic, political and social contradictions of the present moment.
In 2008, the Obama administration was given the responsibility to manage through the Executive, the enormous crisis that crippled global capitalism with the collapse of 2008. The response was the establishment of the foundation for neofascism.
Therefore, it was not a coincidence that the Obama administration was the most aggressively violent administration domestically and internationally in the post-war period. From murdering U.S. citizens and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, to coups in Honduras, Egypt and Ukraine, the attack and destruction of Libya, the war on Yemen, 2,400% expansion of the Department of Defense 1033 program that transferred military equipment to police forces, “pivot to Asia,” and 1,900% expansion of the U.S. Africa Command – the empire was preparing to use and used both “soft” and “hard” power to prop-up U.S. global financial, political and military dominance.
The democrats have hypocritically seized on the issue of the “double tap” that resulted in the killings of two individuals after one of Trump’s attacks on a boat the administration asserts was involved in transporting drugs. But the Obama administration perfected the double tap in the massive use of drone warfare in Somalia and other parts of the world. The second strike would be directed at first responders to the initial attack. Of course, the attacks constituted war crimes but the lack of any concern for international law did not begin with the current administration.
Another innovation of the Obama administration was that it established the basis for the extrajudicial murder of U.S. citizens in theory and in actual practice with the murder of three U.S. citizens by missiles, including a 16-year-old child.
It was reported that 83% of the U.S. public approved of Obama’s drone killing policy and did not care if the individuals identified were U.S. citizens. They trusted Obama. A grant that the current administration would surely love to have.
Along with the right to murder U.S. citizens, the Obama administration won the right to incarcerate citizens indefinitely as enemy combatants as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. Obama ended his administration in December 2016 signing legislation that established an internal censorship board and allowed for domestic psyops, previously ruled illegal within the U.S. All of these efforts were in the name of protecting democracy.
Democrats ridicule Trump officials for their creative reading and application of international law, and even the constitution. But democrats and most “progressives” were silent when Obama and Biden administration officials performed linguistic contortions justifying the murdering and incarceration of U.S. citizens, Orwellian disinformation and misinformation arguments with pressure from tech companies to monitor, limit and censor thought and information, and the systematic assaults on students protesting the U.S. supported genocide in Gaza – all violations of human rights from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the International Covenant on Civil and Human Rights, Rights of the Child, the Convention of Torture, Convention on Racial Discrimination and many more.
People(s)-Centered Human Rights must be the frame for Human Rights if they are to have any value for Global Humanity,
“Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America. . . . This kind of terrorism is extending more and more to groups of peoples whose skins are not black.” (Langston Hughes, 1936)
The link that connects the struggles of Palestine, Africans in the U.S. and various peoples and states across the planet is the common genesis of all of these struggles in the ongoing colonial/capitalist relationship. A relationship that is essentially fascist. History has demonstrated that the contradictory nature of that relationship is such that its resolution requires the negation of one party or element of that relationship. What this means is the violent encounter that established and maintained the relationship of colonial domination and exploitation will only be resolved as a result of a counter violence that will result in the negation of the relationship. This is the fundamental insight that Frantz Fanon gave to the anti-colonial struggle.
The very constitutive structure of the colonial relationship is based on systematic violence and the absence of any idea that colonized people possessed rights that required recognition. Fanon’s insight was reaffirmed by the United Nations Security Council’s vote on November 17, 2025 that negated the existence of Palestine and Palestinians and their fundamental rights by turning over their rights and existence to the U.S. and Israel, two fundamentally fascist settler states.
That vote not only stripped away the last vestiges of UNSC credibility but also buried the Western human rights project. What is emerging in its place is the decolonial concept and approach of “People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs).
“People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR) are those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves and Collective Humanity through social struggle.”
What is clear is that PCHRs represent a political project and, therefore, unlike liberal bourgeois human rights discourse, does not pretend to be non-political. It is a political project that names the main enemies of human dignity and human rights and advocates for building movements to defeat those enemies. PCHRs advances an ethical approach to the idea of human rights that is not dependent on states, legal processes, and the granting of rights. PCHRs instead are created by the people in struggle which is also the source of PCHRs legitimacy.
With the consolidation of fascism and its capturing of most of the international institutions, including the UNSC, the PCHR framework represents a logical strategic approach for anti-imperialist activism and the authentic defense of human rights.
Gaza and the struggle for Palestinian national liberation in many ways represents the end of the old colonial/capitalist order. Whether or not it will be the beginning of a new era “depends on the will, vision, and confidence of the ‘peoples’ still in formation globally.” However, one thing is certain after Gaza. The vast majority of the peoples on this planet understand with much more clarity who the enemies of peace and human rights are.
Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
