The illusion that the language of human rights carries any moral weight is over

For almost a year now, as Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter and destruction in Palestine has continued, I have had almost daily cause to think of a particular passage from Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s enduringly resonant novella about the madness and savagery of European colonialism. The passage concerns a report for an organisation called The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, written by the ivory trader Kurtz, who has been running a trading station in central Africa, and whose “methods” have become increasingly “unsound” – which is to say, murderous. Kurtz is a highly educated and cultured man who, left to his own devices and given absolute power over his African workers, has become a brutal petty tyrant. His report, Conrad’s narrator Marlow tells us, is a beautiful piece of writing, filled with soaring rhetoric about the humane and civilising mission of Europeans in Africa:
“There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes’.”
The passage, well known as it is, retains its strange revelatory power, because it strips away the language of liberal humanism in which Europe’s colonial ventures were so often cloaked, and lays bare the naked and blood-smeared barbarism beneath.
I have thought so often in the past year of this passage, with its still-shocking final sentence, because to pay even minimal attention to the unfolding annihilation of Palestine and its people is to see those words blazing at you, luminous and terrifying, across the abyss of the century-and-a-quarter since they first appeared in print.
Over the course of this past year we have witnessed the final collapse of the idea, as persistent as it was illusory, that western democracies are united by a steadfast commitment to the liberal ideas of human rights and the rule of law. The rhetoric that for so long framed that delusion remains, but its total emptiness is now everywhere apparent. If Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, a claim for which the International Court of Justice has found plausible grounds, then Israel’s allies – in particular the United States and Germany, whose governments keep Israel lavishly supplied with the machinery of death – are at the very least accessories to that crime against humanity.
When Binyamin Netanyahu was invited to speak at the US Congress earlier this year, an official letter signed by both Republican and Democrat leaders requested that he “share the Israeli government’s vision for defending democracy, combating terror, and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region”. And on a state visit to Israel last year, as the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) prepared its ground invasion of Gaza, the German prime minister Olaf Scholz asserted that “Germany and Israel are united by the fact that they are democratic constitutional states,” and that “our actions are based on law and order, even in extreme situations.” Such official statements strike a Conradian note; they echo the “burning noble words” of Kurtz’s report.
But if the West’s leaders speak to us in the controlled and humane language of the report, we can nonetheless read, scrawled across our screens in an unsteady hand, the message of dehumanisation and annihilation that pulses within that language. Barely a day has gone by, over the past year, where we have not seen or heard something that can be translated as “exterminate all the brutes”. When Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant announced the cutting off of supplies of food, fuel and electricity to Gaza by saying “we are fighting human animals”, that could be translated as “exterminate all the brutes”. When the Israeli government posted a video on its official X account in which a freed hostage said that there are “no innocent civilians” in Gaza, that, too, could be translated as “exterminate all the brutes”. And when former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley knelt in front of an artillery shell bought for the IDF by American taxpayers, and wrote in purple sharpie on its casing the words “FINISH THEM” – well, that hardly needed translating at all.
The reality of the war itself, the destruction of Palestinian civil society and the relentless slaughter of its children – the endeavour, that is, to eradicate its past and its future – is, to use Conrad’s terminology, the method of which that language is an exposition.
In her powerful new book, Recognising the Stranger: on Palestine and Narrative, the Palestinian-British author Isabella Hammad suggests that, given the speed and violence of what is happening in front of our eyes, and given the wilful failure of western democracies to do anything about it, we might be arriving at a civilisational turning point, marked by the total collapse of a flimsy consensus around democratic principles and international law. If the US and the UK both voted against the Palestinian right to self-determination, she asks, “should we interpret this to mean that the most powerful nations in the Anglosphere if not the Global North at large believe that Palestinians must remain a colonised and dispersed people forever? . . . That Palestinians must remain subjected to daily violence, impoverishment in refugee camps and permanent political alienation? The powers and principles that govern the world, hardly in hiding, reveal themselves now in three dimensions and technicolour.”
As the slaughter continues unabated, as the ruined and dismembered bodies of children pile up on our screens – in Lebanon now, as well as Gaza – the understanding dawns that there can be no return from this. That there can no longer be any illusion of moral weight to the language of democracy and human rights, spoken by those who held the power to stop this savagery, and who instead gave it sustenance.
Heart of Darkness, and in particular that passage about Kurtz’s report and its hastily scrawled postscript, is enduringly, hauntingly relevant, because it illuminates the hollowness of that language of benevolent western power, and the logic of racist dehumanisation that has always been present at its European source. The powers and principles that govern the world, as Hammad puts it, were revealed then, just as they are now.
Right before he outlines the report, Marlow glosses Kurtz’s background. The company he works for serves the interests of the Belgian king; he himself is of indeterminate and mixed European origin. He is the product of an English education, we learn; his mother was half-English, his father half-French. He is both an embodiment of Europe, of what we now call the West, and a violent refutation of its civilised self-conception. “All Europe,” Marlow tells us, “contributed to the making of Kurtz.”