[News] Liberalism's Death Rattle
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Aug 26 11:25:11 EDT 2025
The September deadline set by France, the UK, Australia and Canada for
Israel to stop its genocide and commit to a two-state solution is fast
approaching.
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Liberalism's Death Rattle
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Nate Bear <https://substack.com/@donotpanic>
Aug 26, 2025
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The September deadline set by France, the UK, Australia and Canada for
Israel to stop its genocide and commit to a two-state solution is fast
approaching. And looming alongside this deadline is a final crisis of
legitimacy for western liberalism.
Firstly, let’s just reflect on how utterly absurd these conditions are:
we’ll recognise your right to your own independent state /ONLY IF YOUR
HOLOCAUSTERS KEEP HOLOCAUSTING YOU/. *They are making the creation of an
entity which, legally, according to the 1948 partition agreement should
have existed for the last seventy seven years anyway, contingent on more
slaughter. *
The pitiful centrist impulse to triangulate every issue has never been
more pathetically, tragically and infuriatingly on show. The belief that
you can carrot-and-stick your way to a liberal sweet-spot solution on
every issue, even an actual holocaust, is such an odious reflex.
Gaza should, and I believe will, mark the end of liberalism. You can't
support an openly declared final solution, announce two years later that
recognition for the victims is /literally contingent on the final
solution proceeding/, while continuing to trade on the same old lines
about human rights, equality, justice.
Gaza has shown it all up as a sham. The events of the last nearly two
years have driven a stake through the dank, rotten heart of this liberal
ideology.
The truth is that (neo) liberalism encases supremacist attitudes in
pro-social language and symbols despite being, today, an inherently and
aggressively anti-social, racist and violent ideology. I don’t
particularly want to get into history, definitions and changing use
here. You can argue that classical liberal thinkers like Thomas Paine or
John Locke would be horrified by genocide, permanent war and the
surveillance state.
But what is inarguable is that liberalism in the twentieth century,
particularly the second half of the twentieth century, has been
dominated by violent centre-right and centre-left liberals. These
groupings and their acolytes broadly agree on free markets, freedom of
suffrage (what they call democracy), some forms of social justice and
equal rights, and they agree on a geopolitical story of the world. They
both identify the same good guys and the same bad guys and also believe
in the need to forever expand the military and surveillance state to
defeat the bad guys. And both these parties, from those in western
Europe to those in North America, believe that to do this, killing lots
and lots of people is frequently justified.
No one with any understanding of recent history could deny this.
Over the last eighty years, liberals of the centre-right and
centre-left, Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservative parties,
have dropped nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, sanctioned the murder of
one million civilians in Indonesia, and from Vietnam to Korea to Libya
to Iraq have invaded, raped and pillaged.
And while Gaza is of a piece with recent liberal history, I don’t think
we can see it as simply another mass murderous episode in western
imperialism. Because what has emerged over the past two years is
something unique.
Gaza breaks what was already an ultra violent mould.
Never in the modern era have we seen two million people be cut off from
the outside world, trapped, unable to leave, starved and systematically
murdered /while made homeless and living in tents./Never in the modern
era have we seen everything be taken from a people, every university,
bakery, school, cafe, office, park, restaurant. Every standing home.
We’ve not seen a state destroy so much infrastructure that it has ended
the ability of an entire society to function as such. No running water,
no sewage systems, no grid electricity. Almost everything in Gaza has
been turned to dust and rubble. Never have we seen a starving people
trapped in a tiny patch of eviscerated land and watched as their
holocausters baited them with food, only to gun them down for fun. Guns
supplied by our governments, with our money. Never have we seen so many
doctors, nurses and journalists torn apart by jets from the sky while
holding nothing but the tools of their work, their stethoscopes and
cameras. Jets supplied by our governments with our money.
No, this is heinous and new, even by western imperialism's barbarous
standards.
You have to go back to ancient Greece or the crusades and the sacking of
cities to find something comparable.
The fact that the resistance continues to inflict casualties on the
invaders under these conditions is a marvel of the human spirit and
should be celebrated as such.
And we certainly haven’t seen violence, war crimes and unspeakable
atrocities on this scale captured so frequently on camera in such
fine-grained graphic detail.
On top of this, every single stage of this genocide was openly declared
by Israel. Israeli politicians said there were no civilians in Gaza,
that everyone was guilty, that they’d starve them, burn them and destroy
everything. They said the goal was to drive them out of Gaza, to
ethnically cleanse Gaza. They said it brazenly, week after week. And
then they did it. And they did it with the support of liberals. Trump
has overseen eight months of genocide. Biden and Harris oversaw fifteen
months. The Conservative party oversaw nine months of genocide.
Starmer’s Labour Party has supported Israel through thirteen months of
slaughter. The liberals in Australia and Canada don’t even have the
excuse that it started on someone else’s watch. They’ve backed this
genocide from the start.
Then a few weeks ago, when this dishonest threat to recognise Palestine
was made, Israel’s finance minister said they’d step up the holocaust in
response and make sure there was nothing left to recognise.
<https://substack.com/redirect/98f436ec-58d4-4f3a-a6cf-153bea03ada9?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>Knowing
they wouldn’t be stopped, they proceeded to do just that, with zero
reaction from the complicit liberal cowards in London, Ontario, Canberra
and Paris.
Liberalism doesn’t have a future after this. Not an energised one, at
least. Gaza signals the final crisis of legitimacy for liberalism and
its supposed international order. Spiritually, it’s over. It will take
time for pro-genocide liberals to face the consequences, time for their
political groupings to be defeated and made irrelevant. International
institutions ruled by liberals will not evaporate over night. But no one
will now take their orders from liberals. No one will be lectured to
about democracy, human rights, and freedom. The global multilateral
institutions run by pro-genocide western liberals will find it
increasingly difficult to maintain their legitimacy in the post-Gaza
holocaust era. The global south has been watching, and through the
expansion of BRICS and the formalisation of new agreements, is now
organising. Domestically, as we saw in the US last November, liberal
bases in the west will no longer come out in sufficient numbers to keep
reanimating the corpse of liberal technocratic management.
The centre could never hold. Among the dead of Gaza lies the liberal
project, the only deserved victim of this genocide.
We are left then with two possible futures: a radically pro-social and
communitarian one, focused on justice and equity for all, or an
authoritarian cesspit of racism, war, and eugenics, administered by the
tools of the outsourced surveillance state. We know these are the
choices, because we’ve already seen it play out. Trump’s victory was in
fact the first sign that Gaza heralded these binary futures. The causes
of Harris’s loss were contested by liberals, but the polls in the weeks
after were clear:
<https://substack.com/redirect/745b04c8-5062-4c07-82c9-5e5f8dbe0220?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>her
support for genocide was a priority issue for enough people who
otherwise would have voted for her, and Trump snuck through.
Without viable pro-social, anti-imperial alternatives, expect this
pattern of pro-genocide liberals losing to proto-fascists to be repeated
throughout the west.
The answer in the face of these frightening dynamics is, obviously, not
to run back to the genocidal warmongering liberals who landed us here.
The answer is to help shape those radical alternatives.
The stakes couldn’t be clearer, the lines sharper than ever.
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© 2025 Nathan Bear
UK
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