The “Monstrosity of Our Century” Is No Prophecy; It Is an Autopsy Written in Advance
“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 — 2
“I do not believe in any rights that are not supported by the power required to enforce them.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche — 3
What I named “monstrosity” in my new book 4 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 7 th , 2023, are the logical
outcome of a moral architecture that I had strived to dissect years ago, more precisely in
two books 5 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 6 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 7 fought with crosses and swords. They don’t even resemble
G.W. Bush’s “crusade” 8 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 21 st
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 9 , Gilbert
Achcar 10 , and John Mearsheimer 11 , 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 12 , thus confirming what had been said by the likes of former US national
security adviser to President Jimmy Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski 13 and George H.W.
Bush. 14
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 15 and the last bulwark against the chaos and brutalization of the world.