Since the 11 September 2001 attacks and the passage of the repressive Patriot Act, the US and the so-called liberal democracies of Western Europe, which followed suit with their own repressive laws, have expanded their already significant policing powers over their own populations, while broadening the justifications for their imperialist wars around the globe.
The post-9/11 surveillance mechanisms instituted in the “West” expanded again during the Covid pandemic 2020-2022, further shrinking liberal rights and “freedoms”. The third wave in the consolidation of police states in these “democracies” began with the suppression of opinions that countered mainstream dogma on the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022.
Civil society institutions, including universities, cultural institutions, orchestras, art galleries, and the press, all actively participated in this suppression by targeting Russian cultural figures, including opera singers and orchestra conductors.
Attempts to eliminate the centrality of the Russian language and literature, including courses on Dostoevsky, in university Slavic and Russian departments and programmes reached apoplectic proportions, though not yet their maximalist potential.
That point was reached after the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Flood operation and the ongoing Israeli genocide that has killed and injured a quarter of a million Palestinians since October 2023.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
What began after World War Two as imperial policing and neo-colonial oppression abroad, as well as racialised and other forms of repression at home, has since 2001 consolidated into a liberal-democratic police state whose repressive powers are no longer exclusively directed outward but are also increasingly directed inward.
Campus repression
Following Israel’s war on Gaza, the combined efforts of the liberal-democratic police state and university administrations to suppress and repress any manifestation of opposition to the genocide have taken an antisemitic turn.
The repression is justified by claims that Jewish and non-Jewish students who oppose the genocide are hurting the feelings of genocide-denying or pro-genocide Jewish students and faculty and making them feel “unsafe”.
These collaborative repression campaigns have dismantled academic freedom, freedom of expression and association, and generated a culture of fear and terror on campuses
This rationale rests on the antisemitic presumption that it is normal for American Jews to support or deny the genocide of the Palestinians.
The fact that a majority of American Jews opposes this slaughter and condemns Israeli actions has not swayed the police state or complicit university administrations.
A widely cited recent poll found that 61 percent of US Jews believe that Israel is committing war crimes against the Palestinian people, while 39 percent believe Israel is committing genocide.
These collaborative repression campaigns, administered under Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump – though American liberals tend to see them as a Trumpian innovation – together with university administrations, have dismantled academic freedom, freedom of expression and association, and generated a culture of fear and terror on campuses.
This is as true in Britain and the United States as it is in the police states of France, Germany and the Netherlands, among others.
This repression now extends into the digital sphere, where Palestinian journalists documenting the genocide have been permanently banned from US-controlled social media platforms.
Policing at home
The war on brown and Black immigrants in the US, which accelerated under President Barack Obama, who deported three million people, has reached horrific levels under Trump.
How US counterterror doctrine turned Minneapolis into a war zone
Read More »
Alongside the targeting of students and faculty for opposing the Israeli genocide, the reign of terror unleashed by Trump’s US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has included the abduction of Arab and Muslim students off the streets and their imprisonment in concentration camps pending deportation.
In its first year alone, this administration abducted and incarcerated tens of thousands of Latin American, African, and Asian immigrants, including children, leading to the deaths of dozens in these horrific camps.
Many have been deported to a torture facility run by El Salvador. Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife and bringing them to US dungeons earlier this month can be seen as a dramatic extension of this policy.
In addition to abducting people off the streets of American cities, including violently dragging them out of cars, federal agents can now invade American homes without warrants.
In recent weeks, ICE has made clear that white people lose their racial privileges if they obstruct its racist mandate of abducting brown and Black people, and can be summarily executed as “domestic terrorists”, as was the fate of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two white Minnesotans killed by federal immigration agents.
Empire turns inwards
Trump’s sacrifice of white people in pursuit of his openly racist policies also extends to America’s white Western European and Canadian allies.
America’s alleged need for lebensraum is such that Trump insists on annexing Panama, Canada and Greenland (though possibly Iceland may also be included as Trump often refers to Greenland as “Iceland”).
Notably, his ambition to “own” Gaza – now being implemented through his “Board of Peace” – and his claim to be the “acting” ruler of Venezuela in order to steal its oil have elicited far less outrage, if any, from Europe and Canada than his designs on their territory.
In his recent Davos speech, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former hedge fund manager and central banker, acknowledged that America’s white allies always understood that US imperialist and racist policies applied only to non-white people and countries, and therefore Canada and Western Europe tolerated them, as they too were beneficiaries: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically.”
Carney added: “We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” Noting that this “fiction was useful”, the Canadian leader admitted: “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”
As these policies now target Washington’s white imperialist lieutenants, however, he conceded: “This bargain no longer works. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
Liberal complicity
But Canada and Western European governments were not the only ones who understood how they benefited from the US propaganda system.
So too did their white liberal intellectuals and artists, who since World War Two have largely supported these policies against the Third World while celebrating liberal democratic privileges enjoyed by white citizens of their “liberal democracies”.
Why academic scholarship on Israel and Palestine threatens western elites
Joseph Massad
Read More »
Many of these liberals also upheld repressive policies against non-white citizens, including Native Americans and African Americans, during and after Jim Crow in the US, and the post-war oppression of French, German, British and Dutch Muslims and Africans in Europe.
More recently, America’s junior imperialist partners supported the dismantling of the international legal order established after World War Two – including attacks on the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice – or backed the November 2025 Security Council Resolution 2803, which will undo the United Nations altogether.
The resolution established the Board of Peace, with Trump as its chairman for life. By shamelessly failing to oppose it, China and Russia sealed the fate of an international order they claimed to be defending from the American wrecking ball.
America’s junior imperialist partners have refused to join the Board of Peace. However, though the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu and Washington’s Arab and Muslim puppets – whose citizens have just been banned by Trump from emigrating to the US – dutifully signed up.
Craig Mokhiber, former director of the United Nations human rights office in New York, described the arrangement as follows: “Mussolini has announced that he is establishing a ‘Board of Peace’ to rule over the survivors of the Holocaust and to take over their property, and he has invited Hitler to be a member of the board. The plan has been endorsed by the League of Nations.”
These latest developments indicate that the final destruction of international law and the UN is being engineered to further increase the policing powers of the United States, internally against its own citizens and externally against even its junior white imperialist partners.
Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Anti-colonial Martinican poet and intellectual Aime Cesaire laid bare the white supremacism at the heart of liberal sensibilities, with his famous analysis of post-war European liberal responses to Nazi horrors. In his 1950 “Discourse on Colonialism”, he affirmed that the retrospective view of liberal European Christians about Nazism is that:
It is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices; and they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack [of that civilization].
The destruction of international law and institutions in order to facilitate Israeli genocide is now being turned against America’s own liberal white citizens
For Cesaire, Nazism was European colonialism turned inwards. What the European “humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century…cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonial procedures that until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the Coolies of India, and the Blacks of Africa.”
The uninterrupted Euro-American support for Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, and the destruction of international law and institutions in order to facilitate it, is now being turned against America’s own liberal white citizens and its erstwhile allies in Canada and Europe, who are no longer immune to US aggression.
Today, there is a strong parallel to Cesaire’s judgment of post-war European liberals in the reaction of Carney – and those who praise and echo him – to Trump’s policies.
It is Trump’s repression of white liberal citizens and attack on America’s white partners that is principally seen as intolerable.
Developments since 2001 have transformed the US – and its junior allies – into a veritable republic of fear for their own citizens, something it has always been for its non-white citizens, and, since World War Two, for non-white people all over the world.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
