The Banality of Evil: Gaza Edition
Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, which to date has killed more than 20,000 people, has exposed the hypocrisy of Western governments that claim to stand for “human rights”, “international law”, etc. as they back Israel to the hilt in its extermination of a trapped civilian population. One of the most striking features of this genocide has been the constant stream of thought-terminating clichés, emanating from state representatives of Western imperialism to express their support for the Zionist regime carrying out genocide.
The most common such cliché is “Israel has the right to defend itself.” No matter what barbarous act Israel carries out, its supporters always respond: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” When Israeli snipers killed a Palestinian woman and her daughter at a church — the mother when she left the church shelter to go the bathroom, the daughter when she went out to help — U.K. government minister Lee Rowley said Israel has the right to defend itself against murderers, which I guess includes unarmed Christian women seeking shelter in a church. One of the most advanced militaries in the world deliberately targeting the most vulnerable civilians is certainly a strange notion of “defence”. But it’s a warped view politicians and the media unceasingly tell us to accept.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence so many politicians in bourgeois democracies start out as lawyers. The task of a lawyer is to advance a legal argument, whether in favour of the prosecution or defence. It’s a handy skill for politicians who need to be capable of such disgusting hypocrisy that they can say whatever they need to in a given context. When Russia kills civilians in Ukraine, it’s a war crime, an atrocity, a crime against humanity. When Israel kills civilians in Gaza, it’s mere “collateral damage” — and anyway, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Spokespeople for imperialist governments troubled by things like principles and consistency won’t last long.
This empty-headed quality of being able to switch on a dime between criticizing atrocities and defending them seems especially common in foreign affairs, where it comes with the job description. Imperialist powers will adopt whatever foreign policy positions suit their interests at a given moment, leaving government officials and media to spin it for public consumption.
Blinken the Butcher and Genocide Joly
I could focus on any number of countless figures in government and media who blandly recite platitudes to defend the indefensible. But two of the most prominent ones that come to mind are U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, aka “Blinken the Butcher”, and Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, whom I’ll go ahead and call “Genocide Joly”.
On Dec. 20, Blinken said of the situation in Gaza that Hamas (read: Palestinians) are “the aggressor” and Israel “the victim”. He laid blame for the current violence exclusively on Hamas, which is the same line as the Israeli government. There was no mention of the fact that Israel has killed more than 20,000 people since Oct. 7. Joly also released a similar statement criticizing only Hamas, again with no mention of the tens of thousands of Palestinians Israel has slaughtered.
Both make empty statements about allowing “humanitarian aid” into Gaza without mentioning that Israel has completely blocked any such aid from being allowed in. Both the United States and Canada showed their continuing support for Israel in practice by immediately deploying naval vessels to the Red Sea after Houthi militants in Yemen launched missiles at Israeli vessels and targeted commercial shipping on this key trade route. To reiterate: U.S. and Canadian imperialism continue to support the state perpetrating genocide, and lay blame for the genocide on its victims.
The career trajectories of both Blinken and Joly correspond to a certain social type: born into privileged backgrounds, gaining law degrees at prestigious schools, building close relationships with those in power through government positions, then finally landing plumb cabinet positions.
Blinken’s father served as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, his uncle as the U.S. ambassador to Belgium. He attended Harvard, held foreign policy positions as an apparatchik in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, served as a “senior fellow” at think tanks that promote U.S. imperialist aggression abroad, and finally took over as secretary of state under Biden. He is a perfect example of a creature of the Washington “swamp” — as former U.S. president Donald Trump hypocritically described it, before going on to bring numerous swamp monsters such as genocide walrus John Bolton into his own administration.
Similarly, Joly’s father was president of the Liberal Party’s finance committee in Quebec and manager of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, and her stepmother a Liberal MP. Joly interned at Radio-Canada, practiced law at two major Montreal firms, and was “mentored” by former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard. She headed the Quebec advisory committee for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal leadership bid before his government appointed her foreign affairs minister.
Like their bosses Biden and Trudeau, Blinken and Joly are individuals for whom defence of the status quo has served them very well. They made their careers by defending capitalist rule at home and imperialist foreign policy abroad. They become very successful regurgitating conventional wisdom at every point, repeating foreign policy bromides that served the interests of the ruling class and ensured their own job prospects. One of the cornerstones of that foreign policy has been unwavering support for Israel as an outpost for Western imperialist interests in the Middle East. No matter Israel’s crimes in its brutal occupation of the Palestinians, it continues to receive full support from imperialist powers like the United States and Canada.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that when Israel finally crosses the line into all-out ethnic cleansing and genocide, the response of ruling class creatures like Blinken and Joly is to continue reciting the same platitudes that served them so well their entire careers. It doesn’t matter how openly Israeli government officials and military leaders announce their genocidal intentions, such as describing Palestinians as “human animals”. It doesn’t matter how many hospitals Israel blows up, how many entire families they wipe out; how many thousands of children are killed by bombs, starve or die of disease as Israel cuts off all access to food, water, electricity, and fuel in Gaza. The response of imperialist apparatchiks like Blinken and Joly is always the same: condemnation of Hamas and parroting the same mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself.”
Hannah Arendt on Eichmann
Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which covered the trial of former SS officer Adolf Eichmann, a key organizer of the Holocaust. The basic idea is that Eichmann did not commit his crimes out of malice or sadistic pleasure. Rather, Arendt said, he was a bland, shallow, thoughtless bureaucrat and careerist. At his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann said he was only “doing his job”. In other words, he seemed “normal”.
It’s hard to read these descriptions of Eichmann and not think of the likes of Blinken or Joly. You get the impression that none of these people really thought much about what they were doing when they supported genocide. They were focused on the minutiae of their day-to-day work and their careers.
When we think of history’s greatest monsters, we tend to focus on obvious hysterical, foaming-at-the-mouth tyrants like Adolf Hitler, as opposed to the bland bureaucrats who helped carry out their orders. Indeed, Israeli proponents of the current genocide against Palestinians are openly bloodthirsty. Yet both the Holocaust and the genocide in Gaza required the support of bureaucrats like Eichmann, Blinken, and Joly to help carry out the extermination. In the case of Blinken and Joly, that means “normalizing” and downplaying Israel’s genocide; focusing laser-like on Hamas to justify all Israel’s actions, and providing diplomatic, political, and military support for genocide.
Another difference, at least for now, is that Eichmann eventually faced justice for his crimes. The defenders of Israel’s genocide in Gaza such as Blinken and Joly are all still at the heights of power. In the absence of a revolution against the system they defend, they can look forward to comfortable retirements. When Western war criminals die, like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, or Donald Rumsfeld, the media celebrates them and they are memorialized as outstanding statesmen, or at worst, “controversial”. The idea that defenders of Israel’s genocide could face justice might seem impossibly distant today. On the other hand, the architects of the Holocaust looked forward to a comfortable retirement in the thousand-year reich, and we all know how that turned out.
Sooner or later, a change is going to come. Hopefully that will be in time to allow supporters of the genocide of Palestinians to face justice for their crimes, as Eichmann did. Whenever this unjust system is overthrown, history will remember all those who carried out and supported the genocide in Gaza as war criminals and accessories to mass murder. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said. “But it bends towards justice.” I hope to see the day that justice is served.
