Racism was the dominationg attitude of the people of European descent in the 18., 19. and 20. century.
With the beginning of the Enlightenment movement, religion lost part of its quality in uniting people. With the arrival of a - partly rather naive - faith in the infallability of science, now genetics became, besides language and culture, the unifying bond between people.
This faith in the pseudo-scientific arguments of genetics could then be exploited not only in nation building but also in colonial enterprises.
Racism became one of the pillars of justification for expansionist, sometimes even genocidal, colonialism and the exploitation of non-western people.
The whole thing culminated into WW II and the violent death of more than 50 million people all over the world.
After this catastrophy which took its toll on European life as it did on non-Europeans, racism and colonialism was not yet dead and buried, but it came into decline in the western intellectual community. And with the end of the majority of European colonial enterprises, with the growth of liberation movements in developing countries and the growth of civil right movements in industrial countries, ultra-racist attitudes declined further.
Racial tolerance and equal respect for people of other cultures or skin-colors grew not only in intellectual circles, but it spread more and more into the general population of western countries.
The process is by far not yet finished and still has a very long way to go, but if you compare the attitudes shown in western media publications only a few decades back and compare it to how similar themes are treated today, you can see and feel progress.
And like colonialism, open supremacist racism is on the way of becoming an anachronism.
Any ideology based on anachronistic ideas has in itself and in everything which is built on it already the seeds of defeat from its inception.
In his post "Feldman and Dershowitz: Mass Murder Apologists" Kurt Nimmo of "Another day in the Empire" quotes those two media pundits and their absolutely indefensible views towards those Israeli war-crimes in Lebanon and Palestine.
Both Zionist intellectual try to make the point in a elaborate and indirect way, that Arab civilians are less worth of the protection from harm than Jewish Israeli civilians. Lebanese children can be killed with impunity because their parents allowed the Hizbollah militia to grow in their midst. Gazan children can be targeted because their parents voted for Hamas.
The interesting thing about those arguments is, how ridiculously they sound to just anybody who is not a Zionist.
I sometimes watch news and documentaries on German TV which are called "today 30 years ago" or even 40 or 50 years ago.
What springs in the eyes is how very different the attitude of those German journalists where towards the people of developing countries from how they are these few decades later.
To be sure those journalists tried to be "politically correct" in the way as was considered politically correct at the time.
And they seemed to consider themselves as humanists as most media people today.
However whenever they reported about people of non-Western cultures then, for our modern ear it sounds so patronizing and so offensive and lacking of respect, as if they were talking about some different species living in the wild of the jungles.
When the problems of war-refugee,the victims of famines and epedemics were discussed, most German reporters would not even make an effort to get a translator to talk to the victims themselves. In documentaries they sometimes would not even talk to government officials, but exclusively to white workers of relief organisations.
I even heard one shocking commentor saying, that maybe medical help was not a good thing for Africa because it caused the "population explosion".
Those journalists of 40 years ago were of course left-overs from an earlier time. They had received their education before WW II. And they had not yet been able to overcome those mental blocks implanted in them.
But at that time, the attitude those journalists showed, was still the majority attitude of, not only Germans, but also other western Europeans as well.
The reason why "the Holocaust" was considered such an extraordinary crime was, that Germans had been mass-murdering their own neighbours, Jewish Germans who had been part of German sociey for ages.
Although about 20 million Russians had been killed at the same time, their lives did not count as much in the western mind, being nearly Asians, neither did the mass-murder of North American Indians or the mass-murders during the slave trade times only a hundred years before WWII. And the mass-murder of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian civilians in the 1960s and 70s was still not yet considered as high a crime as the mass-murder of Europeans.
While in practical terms of war things have not yet changed in the actions of corrupt politicians and helpers, and the soldiers they comman, they did change in the minds of most ordinary western people.
30 or 40 years ago the West would consider Palestinian and Lebanese life as less valuable as Israeli life as a matter of fact.
I think it was not before the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, before you could hear any criticism of Israel coming out of Germany. When "der Spiegel" printed an interview with a Phalangist who had taken part in the massacre, the first stirring of a humanist consciences occurred in Germany. The Phalangist showed more compassion to a donkey hurt by bullets during the massacre than to the many women and children he personally murdered.
This attitude was so close to Nazi ideology, that at least some Germans could no longer totally close their eyes. And said Phalangist also revealed that the massacre committed by him and other the Lebanese Maronites, was practically under the direct order and with the the logistic help of the Israeli troops under their commander Ariel Sharon.
This was in 1982, and since then conscience in Europe has grown, maybe not in the upper echelons of politics, but in the lower population.
Nowadays non-humanistic racists like Feldman and Dershowitz have to construe some elaborate round-away arguments to make their point and it still sounds ridiculously for informed people. It might resonate with non-informed people, but even with those, men like Feldman and Dershowitz could not have gotten away with the plain argument that Israeli Jews are actually more worth than Arabs.
A few years back many little informed ordinary people in Europe, when they heard about Israeli aggression in Palestine, they would just say "let them bash in each others heads, its a hopeless case down there."
Nowadays the same ordinary people get angry when hearing about another Israeli aggression, blaming Israel, sympathizing with the Lebanese and more and more with the Palestinians as well.
What has changed is not so much a vaster pool of information, the mainline media is still pro-Israel biased, the change lies in the general attitude towards people of non-western cultures.
The ordinary man or woman has realized that people no matter how differently from us they speak, pray, dress or eat, they are still people, human beings just like us.
Of course we can still be angry at them, be persuaded to go to war against them. Fall for all kinds of propaganda, even to the point where we commit war-crimes. But most everybody in Europe realizes, when innocent people are killed, it is just as bad, if they are Lebanese, Palestinian and Somali or if they were German, American or French. A child in Iran or Iraq is no different from the children who walk around in one´s own home town or city.
Even those who want to separate their ethnic group from other ethnic groups do realize nowadays, that "the others" are just as human as they themselves. They are on the same level, even if you consider them as hostile.
The attitude of the Israeli apologists is anachronistic. And everybody except they themselves knows it. Xenophobia, the fear of strangers, can still be fueled in a European nation, supremacist ideas, however, can no longer be sustained in the general population.
I think that the racists, Dershowitz and Feldman, are hanging themselves with their own ridiculous writings.
I know it looks as, if all the mainline media agrees with them.
It looks, as if the west accepts what Israel is doing.
The reality however is, that media people, politicians and ordinary people feel disgusted by those arguments.
Yes, most are afraid to say it.
But when they overcome the fear of being called anti-Semitic or loosing their job or reputation, it will be like a flood that cannot be stopped.
To be forced to hide your real thoughts and feelings creates deep anger in the people. Even more anger is created when people realize that they have constantly been lied to for a long time. The stifling atmosphere,that did not allow the people to say and write what they thought, an atmosphere created by the paranoid East German government, was what fueled the protest movement there, and in the end brought the wall and the regime down.
On the subject of Israel and Zionism, the atmosphere here in the west has just been as stifling. Informed people know so much of the truth, but have to choke on it.
And now I think at last the dam of lies has gotten too many cracks for the Israeli centered propaganda to succeed in permanent damage control.
The sad thing about it is, however, that what Israel is doing right now to the Palestinians, what it has done to the Lebanese last summer and threatens to do to Syria and Iran, might in the long run lead to a terrible blow-back against the Jewish people.
The only damage control still possible for the Jewish people around the world is distancing themselves from not only Israeli crimes and atrocities but also from Zionist Israel itself. Of course Israeli Jews should do the same.
While it seems as if Israeli racists and their western supporters have all the power necessary to reach their goals like the military power and the influence in western governments and media, they still have already lost in spite of it.
Of course they still can wreck lots and lots of havoc on the world.
But the worse it gets, the worse will be the blowback.
They already have lost, even while they do not realize it.
When Germany invaded Russia in 1942, it already had lost the war, in spite of having won every single battle before that. It was impossible for any army to win the Russians on Russian soil in a Russian winter, Napoleon had learned it the hard way, Hitler would learn it soon.
However the invasion of Russia was necessary for Hitler and the Nazis to fulfill their ideological goal of creating "Lebensraum" (living space) for the "Germanic race of Übermenschen.
The ideology of the Nazis built in itself the seeds of their defeat.
So actually they had lost the war before they started it.
The anachronism of racist-supremacist colonialism of Israel´s state ideology,Zionism contains the same seeds.
Of course ideologists have no way of thinking clearly. Even after the defeat of Stalingrad the Nazis kept on pushing their army from one defeat to the next with terrible blowback consequences for the German people and a terrible blood-toll for the rest of Europe.
History might repeat itself now with even worse consequences for the world.
Or maybe we, humanity, actually have learned something from it and are able to stop the madness.
Maybe.
