How equal is equal?

It’s an interesting question.

Does equality mean that we are all treated the same?

Does equality mean we are all equal under law?

Does equality mean that men and women are considered equal?

Does equality mean we are all given the same opportunities in education, health services, political representation?

Does equality mean people of different ethnicity, race, language, or religion are considered equal?

We don’t need to look far to see that in many ways, equality is a myth. Priviledge rules across just about every distinction or difference we can draw. In so many ways, inequality is clearly evident, and has been always.

The question is particularly pertinent when considering whether Israel is conducting genocide or a holocaust on the Palestinian people.

The claim made that Israel is not capable of genocide was raised a short while ago, and I believe that was pretty well debunked, refuted. Yes, Israel is very capable of genocide and is adding more and more evidence as the destruction of Gaza continues with an average of 3,000 people in Gaza being killed per month for the last 15 months let alone those who have been rendered homeless through the destruction of homes, apartment buildings, schools, hospitals and infrastructure, and the continuing marginalisation of Palestinians living on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Is that not genocide? But what about a holocaust? Is that a claim too far?

Darren Mc Mahon explores the question of equality through history in his 2024 book ‘EQUALITY: The history of an elusive idea’, and chapter by chapter goes through history exploring the concept of equality, and concept is probably a good descriptor, since however equality is defined, it has never been achieve across populations.

So going through the book, chapter by chapter, suddenly there is a chapter heading ‘DOMINATION The Equality of the Volk’. The previous chapter was ‘ILLUSION From Each According to Ability, to Each According to Need’. In the historical time line, ILLUSION considers the birth of Marxism/Socialism/Communism and the philosophic underpinnings of that debate, and concludes with an interesting quote from the first edition of The Great_Soviet_Encyclopedia published in 1926, written by Iosif Kryvelek, scholar of religion, a historian of Judaism and Christianity, where he observed that “the equality of humankind has been the cherished dream of all workers and all the exploited since class divisions first appeared on earth.” After tracing the long history of the concept through its many ‘different forms’ from antiquity to the present, he echoed Stalin’s warning that “leveling in consumption and personal needs was a reactionary, petit bourgeois absurdity.” Equality, even in Communist Soviet Union was a myth, a dream which could not be realised.

And so we move on to the equality of the Volk, and here McMahon delves deeply into the underpinnings of defining who is of the Volk and who is not in both Fascism and National Socialism (Nazi).

On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland. A Polish friend explained to me that his father, a teenager at that time, was captured and put to work as a slave, working for the Germans throughout the war. Polish people were not as good as German, not ’equal’ to them, and therefore could be enslaved. Jews were even less than Polish people and were to be exterminated.

How did it get to that?

In defining humanity, Mussolini co-wrote a pamphlet, The Doctrine of Fascism in which he ‘affirms the immutable, beneficial and fruitful inequality of mankind’ and ‘denies, in democracy, the absurd conventional untruth of political equality’. Hitler in affirming German as the Master Race is even more explicit, dismissed the idea of ‘equality of all men, no matter what their race or colour’ as a Jewish myth. Using the term Untermenschen, subhuman to describe people other than German, Aryan. The inequality of peoples, of races, was fundamental not just to Hitler’s thoughts but an unquestioned certainty and assumption which permeated European thought and especially so during the period of colonialism, from early in the 15th century. Subhumans were occupying space the real humans, the Master Race needed. Subhumans could be pushed aside to make room for the far more worthy Germans.

The very premise of colonialism is that the colonising race is superior to those whose lands are to be colonised, and who is to work that land; equally based on racial superiority/inferiority. The practice of blackbirding of Pacific Islanders to work the Queensland cane fields was because that work was not suited to ‘white men’ is an example close to home, despite former PM Morrison’s claim that slavery was never part of Australia’s history.

Social Dawinism, the theory of survival of the fittest was applied to humanity, and race, the ‘fittest’ being the colonisers. Prior to the idea of Social Dawinism, European superiority was based on their religion, and powers of innovation which led to industrialisation, engineering better technologies, ships and armaments to invade new found lands as so clearly described by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel. The value of indigenous peoples was minimised, making them dispensible, their lands resources for Europeans cultural and industrial innovation and growth.

When we now look at the question of genocide or holocaust, the categorising of people on a scale of being human or less than human, dehumanising them, makes it far easier to marginalise them, even commit genocide, to be rid of them like vermin. The name-calling, dehumanising comments fill the conversations of racists, of those who are so much better, more evolutionarily developed. I recall a person I worked with in the 1970s: He was from Kenya and spoke of the indigenous as if they were apes, just out of the trees. Or to listen to some white South African immigrants speak disparagingly of ‘blacks’ and using the same terms to describe Australian First Nations people. The names used to describe Jews in Nazi Germany were equally disparaging: Kikes, Yids, Hebe, Hymie… the list is extensive.

Anti-Islam terms abound, so quickly the term terrorist comes to mind. ‘Mulla’ was used recently in the Indian Parliament to disparage a Muslim member… “Oh ‘bhadway’’’ was called, the Hindu term for ‘pimp’, “You terrorist, let me speak, I am warning you. You katwa (circumcised) mullah.” Is in part the attack of BJP member Ramesh Bidhuri on a Muslim in the Indian Parliament in September 2024.

Listening to the Israeli Prime Minister speak of Palestinians, he is less focussed on religion than on dehumanising, calling them Human Animals. Israeli soldiers use animal terms, pig, dog, while Yonathan Netanyahu, an Israeli military officer, in 1976 considered them ‘cavemen’, and Dan Gillerman, Israeli ambassador to the UN (2003-2008) called them ‘inhuman animals’ on Sky News.

Dehumanising people seen as inferior has been around a long time. Romans called non-Romans barbarians. Seeing people as less than human, even as animals, vermin, makes them easier to enslave, to remove from their ancestral lands, to not bother negotiating with as they are displaced by the ‘real humans’. And that is an important considration when looking at the question of genocide, or even holocaust. Going back to the time Earl Balfour promised the Zionist Lord Rothschild that Palestine would become Israel and the ‘negotiation’ offered the Palestinians was to sign on the dotted line, the deal is done. Palestinians were mere Arabs, not Europeans, not an intelligent race of people who were marginalised in Europe, besides, the Zionist Jews were God’s people, seeking their promised land.

The language used and the treatment meted out toward Palestinians mirrors that of Nazi Germany’s language and treatment of Jews in the 1930s and into the 1940s. The complicity of ‘the west’, essentially Europe and the US (oh, and Australia), Britiain as the ‘protectors’ of Palestine after WWI handing over Palestine and watching the thought of a shared space, a two state agreement whither away and the newly formed United Nations signing off as one of the first actions that body took.

Since 1948, Zionist interests have systematically, ethnically cleansed Israel, eliminating Palestinian villages, forcing the evacuation of refugees and continuing that effort through to today. It is hard to know how many Palestinians have been killed or displaced. In 1948 over 700,000 became refugees in Lebanon and Syria, in the 1967 conflict and again in 1972, more refugees moved from The West Bank to Jordan. The death toll is somehow not recorded in any easy to find place.

But an interesting aside, headline news yesterday highlighted that three Israelis had been killed in a terrorist attack in the West Bank. Not much mentioned about the number of Palestinians who were killed in Gaza or why people in the West Bank would be angry enough to shoot up a bus and a car full of Israelis.

Another headline attracted my attention this morning; “US declared Sudan’s paramilitary forces have committed genocide during civil war” in today’s edition of The Guardian. The sub heading reads “Blinken details patterns of ethnic violence in which RSF has killed civilians and blocked access to supplies.”

That does sound a bit like the conflict in Gaza, not just since 7 October 2023, but since 1948, yet, somehow that is not genocide?

Go figure.

Sudanese are… oh, black, and Muslim, African, uncivilised could be a term used, barbarians, sub human, how could they… but the Israelis, they have the right to defend themselves and the land they occupy, legally or illegally is beyond question, they are a civilised people, cultured, industrious, educated, and have the right to exist in their promised land, and will be provided with all the tools needed. Another US$8billion in arms is on the way while the people who provide aid to the sufferers, to the Palestinians are stripped of their support.