Racism accompanies every major war, and while it can serve as a justification the fundamental cause of war is imperialism and capitalist competition, argues Jack Stubley
Racism is deeply embedded in our society. It is frequently used to dehumanise enemies in war. Most recently we have the example of the shameful Islamophobia and racism directed towards Palestinians by the Western media and governments.
The scale of Israeli racism against Palestinians means there is overwhelming support inside Israel for its genocidal violence in Gaza. Zionist groups in Australia and other Western countries are also campaigning relentlessly to support Israel’s violence.
This has led some to see this racism itself as the reason for the war.
But racism is not the cause of war. Rather it is a key part of the way ruling classes legitimise the atrocities committed in wars. This is true of practically every war in modern history.
The colonisation of Australia relied on racism to justify the massacres against Aboriginal people and theft of their land.
This was a war aimed at the dispossession and extermination of Indigenous people. However the driving force behind this was not racism itself but the desire to accumulate wealth through using the land to raise sheep and agricultural commodities for sale on the capitalist markets of Europe.
The Islamophobia after 9/11 served to justify the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a “war on terrorism”, through hysteria about the threat from “Islamic terrorism”.
Former Prime Minister John Howard accused Muslim communities in Australia of failing to integrate, with an accompanying so-called “extremism” problem that was unique from other immigrant communities.
When this rhetoric led to the Cronulla race riots in 2005 where Lebanese-Australians were attacked by drunken mobs, Howard shamefully claimed there was no “underlying racism” in Australia.
Similarly, subsequent Liberal Prime Ministers Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have made noises about radicalisation and the uniquely violent nature of “extremist Islam”, accompanied by heavily publicised police anti-terror raids.
But the wars in the Middle East were motivated by imperialism, with the US’s aim clearly laid out in George W Bush’s National Security Strategy documents, which promoted the unilateral use of US military power to cement its global dominance. Control of Iraq’s oil was supposed to boost the US’s position against rivals like China and Europe.
Israel’s racism
Israeli racism against Palestinians, too, has been on clear display throughout its war in Gaza.
Israeli officials have resorted to blunt dehumanisation, with Defence Minister Yoav Gallant labelling Palestinians “human animals”. Other Ministers argued for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of this earth” because there are “no uninvolved civilians”.
Israel has presented their opponents as savages, with manufactured stories of Hamas beheading babies, a trope of colonialist rhetoric since Irish rebellion of 1641, and unsubstantiated claims they carried out systemic mass rape during the 7 October attack.
The mainstream media here has reported these claims almost uncritically, and shown the usual bias. Israeli atrocities are described in the passive voice as if they were unintentional or responsibility for them is unclear. Palestinian resistance fighters are routinely labelled “terrorists”.
But it is not Israel’s racism or the role of individual Zionists that are the cause of the genocide in Gaza, and the ongoing war against the Palestinians since at least 1948.
This is a result of imperialist support for Israel to act as a “watchdog state” for Western interests in the Middle East.
Zionism has always relied on Western imperialist patrons. Initially, Britain, as the colonial ruler of Palestine after 1917, sponsored a surge in Zionist migration. Israel later had assistance from France before today’s support from the US.
In recent decades US support has been vital to arming Israel and ensuring its economic survival.
After the Second World War oil became of immense importance. This meant that the competition for influence in the Middle East became fundamental to maintaining global economic clout, allowing Israel to play an important role for the US as it sought to control the region.
Israel was founded on the forcible expulsion of the Indigenous Palestinian population, the seizure of Palestinian land, and the attempted eradication of any resistance to this process. But the drive to establish and maintain the Israeli settler-state, the genocidal offensive against Palestinian resistance, and the racism and Islamophobia used to justify it, are all products of imperialism.
Israel suffered a severe humiliation as a result of the Hamas attack on 7 October.
It took Israel four days of fighting to recapture the military bases and communities taken over, and it suffered a civilian death toll greater than in any war since 1948.
The genocide it has unleashed against Gaza’s population is not simply a product of racist fury, but an effort to crush Palestinian resistance and reassert Israel’s military dominance in the region. Maintaining this military clout is vital to ensuring it maintains imperialist support, as an asset in the region capable of enforcing Western interests.
Imperialism
Racism forms a key part of the ideological onslaught by the ruling class to justify wars. But war is ultimately a product of capitalism and the competition for profit that drives the system.
Powerful states use their military might to compete with other powers for control of resources, cheap labour, trade routes and markets in a process of imperialist competition.
This is an extension of the economic competition that is central to capitalism.
As the system has developed, most industries have come to be dominated by only a handful of large firms, a process called monopolisation.
Subsequently, these increasingly influential companies rely on the state to enforce their international and domestic interests while the strength of these firms becomes more important than ever to the state’s national economic interests.
Therefore, it becomes necessary for the state to secure the natural resources, the markets with favourable trade conditions, and security of trade routes to make their industries as competitive, powerful and profitable as possible.
Economic competition no longer operates on purely market grounds, instead monopolisation of each branch of industry has meant the “utilisation of ‘connections’ for profitable deals takes the place of competition in the open market” as the Russian revolutionary Lenin put it.
This process directly led to the imperialist colonial expansion of the 19th century including the scramble for Africa and the two world wars immediately following it.
After all the world was divided up among the major European powers, the persistent need to economically expand and compete meant that the only option left to was to try to seize the holdings of other imperialist powers, leading to military conflict between them.
The economic struggle between rival companies therefore directly became the military struggle between rival states.
The First World War was the result of a whole host of imperialist powers—Britain Germany, Austria-Hungary, the US, Japan, Russia, Italy and France—all competing for dominance. The imperialist interests of states competing to control and profit from the world market spilled over into war, and the same industrial development that had created that competition also made it the deadliest war the world had yet seen.
Despite the devastation, the underlying imperialist tensions were not resolved. The outcome of the war simply meant that the spoils of colonial holdings were redivided to the benefit of the victorious nations.
The losers, who lost secure access to the raw materials and markets necessary to grow their industries and economies, resorted to military expansion again to seek to rectify this.
This led to the horrors of the Second World War.
Racism does not explain the continued wars that threaten us today. The return of war to mainland Europe in Ukraine, for instance, is clearly a product of imperialist competition.
Ukraine is the site of a proxy war between NATO and the US against their rival Russia.
There the Western powers are trying to maintain a geo-political bulwark against Russian imperialism and continue expanding their influence into Eastern Europe, while Russia tries to prove it can still exert military power and influence into mainland Europe.
Ukraine has been subject to political meddling from the West for decades. During the US-backed 2004 colour revolution and Euromaidan revolution in 2014, millions of dollars were poured into campaigns promoting closer alignment with the European Union, in open antagonism to Russia.
Since then, the US has spent billions arming Ukraine, with staunchly pro-US Ukrainian President Zelensky expressing a desire to be a “big Israel”, as a heavily militarised Western-backed watchdog state in the local area.
Russia’s attempt to reassert the control it once wielded over Ukrainian industry, ports, and natural resources such as oil and gas, has been seized on by NATO as an opportunity to bleed Russia and weaken its geo-political influence.
When there was a real possibility of peace on the condition of Ukrainian neutrality, then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson encouraged Zelensky to “make war”.
Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been sent to their deaths, with scenes of trench warfare reminiscent of the First World War.
But imperialism is not all-powerful. Palestine has been a lightning rod for resistance in the Middle East, frequently exposing the hypocrisy of the Arab ruling classes as their words and their actions become increasingly misaligned, acting as a constant reminder of Western imperialist influence in the region and their collaboration with it.
The issue of Palestine was deeply embedded within the revolts during the Arab Spring of 2011.
Here at home the same racist treatment of Palestinians has exposed the hypocrisy of the media and the craven loyalty to imperialist interests of Anthony Albanese’s government.
We need to oppose both the genocide and the racism that is accompanying it, but also understand the underlying forces of capitalism and imperialism that are responsible both for racism and the ongoing wars and genocide in Palestine.
