eyes wide shut: at the end of western hegemony
And at the end of Western civilisation, on the brink of its last breath, the West remained true to itself and aided a genocide.
Foreword: Since I started typing this essay almost a year ago (slow journalism baby), Israel bombed Lebanon, invaded and bombed Syria, kept committing genocide in Palestine, and attacked Iran. All with the full support of the West, too happy to turn a blind eye. It’s only Arabs anyway, huh. Don’t be mistaken, this is all made possible by racism and decades of Islamophobia.
This article is too long for email, please read online or on the Substack app. This is the first part of a series analysing civilisation collapse and its symptoms.
The genocide committed by Israel, and the West by proxy, grows the dark, red stain on the moral high ground (if there was ever one) claimed by the Western elites. A lot of us observe the unfolding of events without surprise: they follow the logic of imperialism, centuries of wars fought over religion, power, influence, oil, money.
But the elites have lost control of the discourse.
Their unwavering support for Israel, despite mass protest and very little support from the public, tells a bigger story, one of decline. This, combined with an already fractured society, the erosion of democracy and a cycle of crises, reveals how rotten the flesh of Western civilisation has become. Could the genocide in Palestine bleed it dry?
Cultural hegemony and the distortion of reality
A recent Guardian article describes the BBC World Service as “just one institution promoting Britain’s soft power abroad”,1 reaching 450M people a week, it is hard to argue the important influence of the broadcaster. Further in the article, Jonathan McClory2 describes the World Service as a fortunate event of history, one that enables the UK to “shape a global information landscape and promote British values, such as a free press, transparency and broad support for human rights”. lol, but seriously?
A study by the Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 35,000+ pieces of BBC content and found that the coverage of the Palestinian genocide shows systemic bias against Palestinians. One of the key findings, with suppression of genocide allegations and the muffling of Palestinian voices, exposes how the BBC gives Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage. The BBC is not the only legacy media outlet whose coverage is biased in favour of Israel. An analysis of over 61,000 New York Times headlines from October 2023 to June 2025, conducted by
, reveals “a systematic pattern of dehumanization”.BBC staff: we're forced to do pro-Israel PR, BattleLines with Owen Jones
This is hegemony at work. Cultural hegemony is described by the politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci as the supremacy of the ruling class in a capitalist system. Through intellectual, cultural, moral and political superiority, the ruling class establishes its dominance by disseminating its ideas, which are then assimilated and widely accepted by society without violence or coercion. In a democracy, peaceful assimilation is critical to legitimise power at home and abroad.
It is in the elites’ interest that we support Israel: their ideas are propagated through the media owned by their friends, and then are supposed to be assimilated and accepted by us.
There was a time, not that long ago, when the BBC’s influence may have turned public opinion in support of Israel, fulfilling its role as a tool of soft power. No longer. Not when we can see the genocide unfold almost minute by minute on our phones, not when we have access to the voices of those opposing the murders of civilians, not after we saw what happened in Iraq, and the truth came to light. Not even the shadow bans on accounts supporting Palestine on Twitter (X) and Meta apps (Instagram, Facebook) are sufficient to silence the opponents. Our governments may be deaf to our pleas, but they have failed to adapt, they got complacent and greedy, and all they can do is silence the opposition and move towards authoritarianism (so much for liberal democracy).
Societies that fail to adapt disappear.
Despite the establishment's best attempt at controlling the discourse, an IPSOS poll shows 60% of the UK public believes ‘Israel’s military action in Gaza as part of its conflict with Hamas has gone too far’, while 73% support an immediate unconditional ceasefire.
Western moral and political hegemony has eroded over the last few decades. Domestically, trust in democratic institutions (justice system, media, etc.) and the political elite is declining, giving authoritarianism and far-right movements space to grow. On the international stage, notably in the Middle East, devastating imperialistic wars and interventions led to the disillusionment and anger of populations who are finding themselves abandoned. It has become clear that the values promoted by the West, to quote McClory, “free press, transparency, human rights”, were nothing but the Trojan horse of imperialism.
Crumbling institutions & ripple effects
Domestically, this erosion led the elites to use an increasing number of illiberal tools of control to impose their ideology. We saw it with the violent policing of the pro-Palestine protest and groups, the attempts to ban them, to control the language and censor discourse, to abuse their legislative power to criminalise any threat to their authority.
Human rights, gender equality, democracy, etc., have all taken setbacks and are being replaced with authoritarianism and/or illiberal policies. The Palestinian cause certainly played a role in the UK general elections last year, and cost Labour a few seats as candidates ran as independents: out of the record-breaking six independents elected, five campaigned as pro-Palestine. At best, the major parties are deaf to public opinion; at worst, they are willing accomplices in war crimes in their relentless support of Israel. Unfortunately, they’re the worst.
Not only will the traditional parties lose their leadership and the trust of the public, but they provide the far-right with ammunition to turn the public opinion in their favour. Wannabe authoritarians will, once again, seize the political agenda and call for tougher immigration policies, deportations, and will most certainly use refugees and immigrants as scapegoats for all that is wrong in their country. We are already seeing this with Farage (again, eww)
Reform Is Reheating the Burqa Ban. It’s Obvious Why, Novara Media, 13 June 2025
The hypocritical policy they are conducting with Israel and the laissez-faire in the name of Israel’s right to defend itself is causing outrage all over the world. Despite the International Court of Justice's recommendations and the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ousted Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leaders, for alleged war crimes, Western governments keep doing business as usual with Israel, placing themselves above the law and further alienating the public.
The image of Western leaders and their ‘values’ is tarnished all around. They have no moral high ground to claim, no legitimacy. Ismaeel El-Khateeb analyses the erosion of Western hegemony in ‘Gaza and the decline of US-Western hegemony’:
What we are seeing unfolding in front of our eyes is the collapse of US-Western hegemony and the West’s unearned role as arbiters of truth, freedom and human rights in the world. The facade of moral values and freedom championed by the West is being exposed by Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza. Not only have the US and some of its major allies rejected rulings and recommendations of the very international bodies that they helped to create, but they are also becoming authoritarian regimes of the kind that Washington, London, Berlin et al have always criticised in public if it doesn’t suit their interests to cosy up to dictators in Africa, East Asia and the Middle East.
Western nations have conveniently ignored international laws for decades. I think only those who wanted to believe in the ‘goodness’ of the West saw what they wanted to see. The values I mention above have been exploited by the West to invade countries, to topple governments, to contribute to wars, and to break international laws. Leader after leader proudly declared they wouldn’t respect the arrest warrant and would refuse to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu were he to set foot in their country.
We are now in a period of downturn: international law will not disappear, but its institutions will probably continue to lose credibility and their rulings will carry less weight. The degradation of international law will be accompanied by a parallel erosion of the rule of law within states.3
Scandals after scandal, our governments made fools out of us, and our distrust is only growing. They are not willing to respect the law, so why should we? What happens once citizens stop believing in their governments’ moral, political and intellectual leadership?
Conclusion
The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, recently declared: "Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.” The dirty work here is bombing Iran. Germany, alongside the United States, is the biggest weapons exporter to Israel. In 2023, then British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, granted export licenses to sell at least 42 million pounds of defence equipment. When they defend Israel’s right to protect itself, I bet all they can think about is the big fat check coming their way.
Interviewed by Drop Site News on the disappearance of Abdulrahman Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and the lack of protest from the international community, notably from European governments and the UK, which have avoided commenting, Joey Shea, researcher at Human Rights Watch, confirms:
“Western governments prioritize arms deals, trade, and counterterrorism partnerships over human rights,” said Shea. “That silence enables the abuse.”
They tell us to condemn October 7, to look at the massacre committed by Hamas as if it were the original sin. But nothing started on 7th October 2023. This is the fruit of decades of imperialism, from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the eye-for-an-eye escalation between Iran and Israel. This has ‘Made by the West’ written all over. As Owen Jones puts it (in response to Merz’s statement):
this is a confession - Israel’s crimes are indeed the crimes of the West. It is Western states who must be held accountable.4
It is not just Israel that the West is enabling. The above-mentioned Drop Site News article revealed the international infrastructures enabling authoritarian coordination between Arab States, and how it allows them to suppress dissent across borders. The article reports on the case of Al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian-Turkish poet and political dissident, who was detained by Lebanese authorities and extradited to the UAE. An “alarming example of how Arab states are quietly collaborating to eliminate dissent beyond their borders, leveraging a little-known security pact to detain, extradite, and disappear critics under the guise of regional cooperation.”
It feels like we are witnessing something bigger than “just another war in the Middle East”. It feels like the eye of the storm has yet to come, the sky has turned hopeless dark, and we wait, powerless. Is this how we fall?
At the end of Western civilisation, on the brink of its last breath, the West remained true to itself and aided a genocide. The violence is a tool to control us: look what I do to them, I can do it to you if you step out of line.
postword: I feel any words I write are meaningless in the face of the atrocities committed and those to come. I worry our protests, our cries for peace, mean nothing to those in power. Maybe we should all go on strike, you know, hit them where it hurts, crash the economy or whatever. The more I consider it, weigh the pros and cons, the more I think yeah, fuck it, crash the economy, sink the country. But I fear, we, the people, will be the ones bearing the consequences. So we keep writing, we keep protesting, we keep doing whatever we can to show our anger, pain and hopelessness.
This is part one of a series. Next time we’ll go deeper into the language of war, how it interacts with racism and misogyny, and we’ll analyse the Iraq invasion in parallel to the development in Iran. Make sure to subscribe so you won’t miss it!
/ in parallel /
One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, Omar El Akkad (this is a must-read.)
2024 witnessed ‘absolute failure’ of west to lead fight for human rights, says watchdog, The Guardian
US Bombs Iran – Is There an Antiwar Party in This Country?, zeteo
Welcome to Britain 2025: where a musician’s words cause more outrage than the murder and horror in Gaza, The Guardian
Term was coined in 1990 by Joseph S. Nye, in opposition to ‘hard’ military power. While power is the ability to change the behaviour of states, soft power is to do so through a culture and ideology attractive to other countries, which therefore will be willing to follow.
Managing director of Sanctuary Counsel, a firm of communications and reputation advisers, and expert on soft power
Are we witnessing the death of international law?, The Guardian
Israel’s criminal attack on Iran is based on lies, Battle Lines with Owen Jones
This was a powerful read. I'm also still reeling from the programme that aired on Channel 4 last night about Israel's targeting of hospitals in Gaza. It also made me feel quite ill, as well angry, that a genocide committed in full view of the world doesn't unite people in condemning the atrocities we're seeing. The fact people deny it or support it staggers me.