As the genocide in Gaza drags on month after month, a number of commentators have justifiably pointed to the dehumanization of the Palestinians, not only by Israel but also by politicians and conventional media in much of the Global North, as a root cause of the unfolding horror. Back in June, for example, Brice de le Vingne, head of the Doctors Without Borders Emergency Unit in Gaza, noted, “Since October (and certainly before), the dehumanization of Palestinians has been a hallmark of this war. Catch-all phrases like ‘war is ugly’ act as blinders to the fact that children too young to walk are being dismembered, eviscerated and killed.”

Such comments reflect the obvious reality that a sustained process of slaughtering civilians with weapons supplied by Western governments would not be possible without an assumption that the lives of the victims are sufficiently cheap to render them expendable. This has now been reinforced by Israel’s monstrous “pager attacks” in Lebanon. The United Nations has concluded, “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life.”

To drive home how the large scale booby-trapping of electronic devices, some of which must inevitably explode in public places, rests on a presumption that the lives of the victims are of little account, it is only necessary to carry out a simple mental exercise. If we imagine a situation in which such a tactic were to be employed by a foreign intelligence service in any major city in the West, it’s not hard to envision the kind of response that would ensue: the outrage would be unrestrained and the reprisals would be swift and severe. Yet, such a vile crime against humanity is tolerated when it happens in Lebanon.

“The industry standard is to dehumanize Palestinians,” observes Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed El Kurd in an article for The Nation on the attitudes of Western media. “Our grief is negligible; our rage is unwarranted. Our death is so quotidian that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather. Cloudy skies, light showers, and 3,000 Palestinians dead in the past 10 days. And much like the weather, only God is responsible: not armed settlers, not targeted drone strikes.”

Global dimensions

This calculated disregard for the value of Palestinian lives is but one especially stark expression of a set of long established and deeply rooted racist attitudes that has global dimensions. We live in a world in which wealthy imperialist countries dominate and exploit the nations that are poor and oppressed. It is not surprising that this great international injustice involves the devaluing of human life. The conduct of political leaders in the West attests to this but it is also in evidence if you examine the track record of the corporate media.

An article from the European Journalism Observatory (EJO), written last May, concluded that “European mainstream media ignore humanitarian crises in the global south.” It pointed to the civil war in Tigray, Ethiopia, as a particularly glaring example. Despite it being “the deadliest war of the 21st century… it has been almost completely ignored by leading media and mainstream news in some European countries.”

The EJO found a “pattern of reporting [that] is significantly less receptive to events that occur in developing and least developed countries,” while “the dominance of reports from the Global North is staggeringly overwhelming.” In one striking example, several major European media outlets were found to have devoted more coverage to an incident at the 2022 Oscar ceremonies where one actor slapped another than they did to “the war in Tigray and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen combined.”

Last June, an article in Al Jazeera noted, “The sinking of a migrant boat in Greek waters and the catastrophic implosion of a Titanic-exploring submersible in the North Atlantic Ocean stand as contrasting examples of the media’s powerful influence in shaping narratives and commanding public attention.” It showed how the coverage devoted to the respective incidents was crafted to evoke a great deal more empathy and interest in the case of a mishap involving five wealthy thrill-seekers than was the case when an overcrowded boat carrying migrants sank, with 78 confirmed dead and hundreds more missing.

Western media coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provides another powerful object lesson in the dominant ideology’s hierarchy in the value of human life. Without in any way diminishing the brutality and suffering that has been inflicted on the Ukrainian people, it is clear that far greater attention has been paid to Ukraine than would be the case with a military conflict in the Global South. Certainly, the Western powers are supportive of the Ukrainian side for their own strategic reasons but there is still plenty of evidence of the racist double standard in the coverage of the conflict.

Perhaps the most glaring example of this double standard, though by no means unique, was provided by the CBS News senior correspondent in Kyiv, Charlie D’Agata, who, at the start of the conflict in 2022, stated, “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.” If that’s what he says when he’s choosing his words carefully, we might not want to contemplate what might escape at an unguarded moment.

Colonial roots

This sliding scale in the value of human life serves the dominant material and ideological interests at this point in time. A world order that is exploitative and profoundly unequal will produce ideas and values that serve to justify the injustices it perpetuates, and racism remains central to this process. Such thinking, however, is historically rooted and can be traced to the dawn of European colonialism. It is true that there is debate over whether the xenophobia and chauvinism that existed in earlier societies can be described as racist. However, at the very least, it must be asserted that the expansion of the European powers led to the proliferation of racist ideologies and the oppressive practices that flowed from them.

The 2007 BBC documentary, Racism: A History, advances the argument, as one reviewer notes, that “racism emerged as a product of social and economic factors… as the European intelligentsia sought to legitimize the slave trade.” It functioned “as a means of proving that the process of African enslavement was justifiable” and so “the concept of a hierarchy of human races existing was employed.”

This process of “linking the desire of capitalist systems for the ceaseless acquisition of profit with the enslavement of millions” generated racist forms of thinking that were also a major part of the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the building of colonial empires. However, it is important to understand that Europeans “didn’t become slave traders because of racism, they became racist because of the slave trade.”

As a G7 Western power, Canada can most assuredly be ranked among the exploiting, rather than exploited, countries of the Earth. However, its role as an international predator must be considered alongside the fact that it was created through a process of settler colonialism that is still very much a work in progress. To this day, the dehumanization that we have considered in Gaza, and that underlay the slave trade, exists within Canada. Stark evidence of this is all around us and we see it imposed on the daily lives of Indigenous people and their communities. To cite just one telling example, in 2020, APTN reported on the long ordeal of the residents of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation on the Ontario-Manitoba border. It noted that it had been more than a century since Shoal Lake became the source of clean water for the city of Winnipeg. Yet, “at the other end of the pipe, Shoal Lake 40 had been turned into a man made island and the aqueduct constructed to provide Winnipeg with water was built on the First Nation’s old burial grounds.”

For generations, the people of this community had to endure this enforced isolation and, at the time that the APTN article was written, they had been living with a boil water advisory for more than two decades and some people were suffering from rashes. The hardships they faced were obviously considered a price worth paying for the effective delivery of clean water to a major Canadian city. Had such treatment been inflicted on a mainly non-Indigenous community, there would have been a national scandal but, even if it was left unspoken, the racist hierarchy in the value of human life was fully in effect.

Under the present conditions of overlapping crises besetting global capitalism, there is likely to be even greater indifference to the value of human life in the Global South. The climate crisis will certainly intensify and this will generate growing numbers of climate refugees. This instability and uncertainty will be compounded by a range of factors, from global rivalry and the threat of war to economic downturns and the impossible levels of debt imposed on poor countries.

In all of these situations, the attempt will be made to make the people of the Global South shoulder the burden, with scant regard for the death and misery that ensues. This long-established hierarchy in the value of human life, rooted as it is in colonial history, must be countered with a clear and determined anti-racism and the most robust forms of international solidarity.

John Clarke is a writer and retired organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Follow his tweets at @JohnOCAP and blog at johnclarkeblog.com.