I was born in 1967, a little over 20 years after the end of the Second World War. As a child and then a teenager, it seemed a long time ago, but I later realized how close the horrors of that period still felt.

I remember this 15-year-old boy, alone in front of the TV, one very late evening at the beginning of the 80s, when a wind of freedom and daring was blowing on French television. I was fascinated as I watched a documentary on the Second World War.

As the images of the liberation of the death camps unfold, I can see myself overwhelmed by uncontrollable sobs at the sight of those mountains of skeletal bodies and the haggard looks on the faces of the few survivors. In my head and in my stomach, the abyss. Then the void slowly fills with a dull hum and a question: “How can humans do this to other humans?”

And how did 1930s Germany, at the pinnacle of this Western civilization grounded in the humanism of the Age of Enlightenment, sink so low?

Later, I would learn from reading Bruno Bettelheim that all you need to do is convince yourself that the other person is not really human, just a repulsive animal towards whom any feeling of empathy constitutes a danger for the oppressor who experiences it.

So sure, right after the war, in 1948, the UN adopted the universal declaration of human rights, championed by people who defined themselves as humanists, with the slogan “Never again!”

But what exactly was supposed to happen never again? And what is a human being anyway?

While the answers to these questions should have been obvious, the reality is that they were not.

Otherwise, how can we explain that as soon as they had rid themselves of Nazi rot, the Western colonial powers hastened to violently repress the liberation movements of their colonies and to justify the maintenance of colonial systems such as apartheid in South Africa or in Israel?

France was a good example of this fake humanism: while it considered the German occupation an abject injustice, it found it perfectly legitimate to continue the subjugation of the peoples it had colonized and deprived of their right to self-determination since the mid-19th century.

One might have thought that the universal declaration of human rights in general, and the principle of the right of all peoples to self-determination in particular, had been intended as an antidote to colonialism. Indeed, if all peoples have the right to self-determination, it is logically illegal to conquer and subjugate them, and peoples already subjugated must be liberated without further delay.

But it was not to be, and the Western colonial powers only consented to the emancipation of their colonies when they were forced to do so.

Even more deplorable: it was precisely at the time when the UN proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Israel was created, with a nationalist and colonial ideology that would be unleashed in Palestine throughout the second half of the 20th century, growing ever stronger until reaching the paroxysm of violence that we are witnessing today, as the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close.

But is this really surprising, when we know that Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, was a child of the 19th century, which saw the concept of nation-state and its ideological corollaries of nationalism, supremacism and colonialism?

And he indeed wrote in his personal diary: “If it is God’s will that we return to our historic fatherland, we should like to do so as representatives of Western civilization, and bring cleanliness, order and the well-distilled customs of the Occident to this plague-ridden, and blighted corner of the Orient”. And also: “Actually it is an element of German culture that would come to the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean with the Jews”. The very same German culture that would set itself the task, a few decades later, of making the Jews disappear.

According to the nationalist ideology, each emerging nation has a duty to construct a national narrative affirming its racial, cultural and technological supremacy over others, particularly its neighbors. Theodor Herzl died in 1904, and one wonders what he would have made of this ideology if he could have seen where it would lead: two world wars in the first half of the 20th century, with a combined total of 100 million civilian and military deaths, culminating in the destruction of the European Jews.

Another question haunts me: if a young rebel from the Warsaw ghetto had found himself instantly teleported from April 1943 to April 2024 in Gaza, who would he have felt closest to? Hilarious Israeli soldiers filming themselves vandalizing what remains of Palestinian homes in the ruins of Gaza? Or Palestinian civilians constantly forced to flee the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals and schools?

Any form of double-standard humanism is a lie, and anyone practicing it is an impostor.

Unfortunately, the traditional media, sponsored by their governments or by some billionaires, offer these false humanists a lot coverage.

When I was 15 years old and sobbing alone in front of the TV, what I saw were not Jews, Gypsies or any of the other communities that the Nazis categorized as Untermenschen; what I saw were my brothers and sisters, fellow human beings.

Through a twist of fate that only history can claim, the Palestinian tragedy now offers us a sharp way of recognizing the fake humanists among our interlocutors. To do so, all you need to do is ask them a few simple questions.

  • Why is it that in the traditional media, Israeli civilians detained by Hamas are referred to as hostages, while a journalist cannot, on the penalty of being suspended, refer to Palestinian civilians detained without trial for years in Israeli prisons as hostages, even when they are women and children?
  • Why is it that when Israeli hostages are released, the media informs us of their names and shows us the legitimate displays of joy of their families, whereas when Palestinians are released, the Israeli government strictly forbids them from publicly showing any joy? And why do the traditional media almost never talk to us about it, and even when they do, nothing is said about who these freed Palestinians are, or about the suffering endured during their captivity?
  • Why is it that when commentators on the mainstream media supports the right of Palestinians to self-determination, they are systematically asked beforehand to condemn the attacks of October 7, but pro-Israeli commentators are never asked to condemn Israel for the many violations of international law that this country has committed?

If, when faced with this type of question, your interlocutors tries in one way or another to justify this double standard, make no mistake: their humanism is nothing but a fraud.

The truth, unfortunately, is that contrary to what one might have thought at the dawn of the 21st century, we are far from having overcome racism, supremacism and colonialism.

Just as the extreme refinement of German society in the 1930s concealed a visceral contempt for a part of humanity, today’s false humanists are nothing but frauds and sophists, using their eloquence to mask their atavistic supremacism.

To be convinced of this, you only need to listen to the rhetoric of many Western governments and their media spokespersons. This rhetoric ranges from the rehabilitation of our colonial past to plans for future colonization (of Canada and Greenland, for example), via the normalization of ongoing colonizations, particularly in Israel and Ukraine.

What people supporting this revival of supremacism and colonialism forget is that we are always someone’s Untermenschen, and that any society built on hatred of others, whoever they may be, will sooner or later devour its own children.

This is precisely what Aimé Césaire stated in his speech on colonialism:

“Yes, it would be worthwhile to study, clinically, in detail, the actions of Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanist, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century that he carries within him an unconscious Hitler, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he reviles him, it is due to a lack of logic, and that deep down, what he does not forgive Hitler is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man in itself, it is the crime against white man, it is humiliation against white man, and to have applied to Europe colonialist methods which until then had only been applied to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa.“