The Liberal World Order is a Death Cult in Human Rights' Garb

The Bible, once brandished to sanctify the chains of slavery, and to condone the annihilation of indigenous cultures, has found its modern counterpart in the language of Human Rights.

By Karim Bettache

As the holiday season casts its enchanting spell, with its festive tunes and the warmth of shared joys, a poignant dissonance arises when one's thoughts drift to the suffering that festers beyond our decorated thresholds. It is a stark contrast that we at BettBeat Media cannot turn a blind eye to. Especially as we heed the grave reflections of Yanis Varoufakis, who compels us to question the integrity of our celebration amidst the cries of suffering children in the ‘Holy Land’. This land, once a cradle of ancient narratives, now bears the scars of an enduring tragedy—a genocide that stands as a stark reproof of our collective moral failing.

Let us remember that Europe is the birthplace of antisemitism rooted in colonial white supremacy, a dark legacy that culminated in the Holocaust. Tragically, the shadow of historical injustices extends into the present; since the 1930s, we have witnessed the Nakba—a systematic displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people—unfolding with persistent cruelty. This, now escalating into what can only be called a genocide, is part of a broader pattern of inaction — or outright support — by the West. The suffering in Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Ukraine, Libya and Syria stands as a damning testament to the distasteful superficiality of Western human rights rhetoric, which often fails to protect those suffering under the weight of its own imperialistic tendencies.

The genocide in Palestine—with Europe's tacit support and a media landscape that often seems to champion the aggressor—lays bare the utter brutality entrenched in the settler colonialist psyche of European imperialist culture.

The invocation of ‘Human Rights’ has become the preferred cudgel wielded by Western powers to subdue and chasten those peoples who dare to seek liberation from the neo-colonial yoke that has been meticulously crafted by the West. This rhetoric, much like the sacrosanct veneer of the Bible in centuries past, is employed as a righteous guise, a manipulative tool to obscure a far more sinister reality. It is a facade, a perverse appropriation of ethical language, to mask the raw, unbridled depravities of European cultural imperialism that continues to ravage the psyches and societies of the oppressed.

The West, with its self-anointed moral supremacy, assumes the role of global arbiter, determining which nations are deemed worthy of dignity and which are not. It is a grotesque spectacle, wherein the very nations that have plundered, pillaged and raped continents are the same that now presume to lecture the world on the sanctity of human dignity.

But let us not be deceived by the grandiloquence that emanates from the thrones of hypocrisy. The Western invocation of Human Rights is not a benevolent enterprise; it is a strategic one, designed to maintain an international order that is congenial to the interests of power and capital. For the colonized, the subjugated, and the disenfranchised, the rhetoric of rights is a cruel irony—a reminder that their suffering is both invisible and inconsequential to the architects of their oppression.

The Bible, once brandished to justify conquests and subjugation, to sanctify the chains of slavery, and to condone the annihilation of indigenous cultures, has found its modern counterpart in the language of Human Rights. It is the same old wine of domination, only now it is being served in a new chalice, with the blessings of international law and the chorus of liberal democracies. But the substance is unaltered: a relentless pursuit of control, cloaked in the sanctimonious garb of civilization.

As Varoufakis states: ‘human rights’ are ‘that which Europe and the US never intended to grant the oppressed’. This echoes my critique that human rights have too often been "white-human rights," wherein the sanctity of these rights has been preserved for the privileged while systematically denied to others—often those in the Global South or from marginalized communities within the West itself.

This season, as we ponder the spirit of goodwill and the celebration of human dignity, we must confront the uncomfortable truth that our commitment to human rights remains selective and deeply flawed. The festivities we enjoy stand in stark contrast to the plight of those who, because of their ethnicity, gender, location, or socio-economic status, find the promise of these rights to be a distant, unattainable mirage.

It is not enough to proclaim human rights as a lofty principle; it is the duty of all who believe in their universality to demand that these rights be upheld without prejudice or exception. Only then can we begin to dismantle the hypocrisy of a rotten system that venerates human rights in speech but violates them in action.