In ancient Rome, Janus was the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings and thus perhaps the most important of all the gods. As represented in the statuary, the head of Janus has two faces, back to back, facing opposite directions. What Janus meant to the ancient Romans is quite divorced from what the image represents in the modern world, which is someone or something that is two-faced and not to be trusted. 

As a metaphor, Janus describes ‘western’ civilization perfectly. One face is how the collective west likes to see itself, as the font of great scientific, philosophical and artistic achievements. The other face is the dark side; a civilization that is not civilized at all when it comes to taking what it wants and is capable of great savagery. 

If the ‘west’ has been triumphant for the past half millennium; it is not in spite of its capacity for barbaric behavior, but because of it. In conquering the new world and subjugating the old one, the armies representing the ‘west’ have been remorseless in their brutality. The colonization of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is a path soaked in blood from the beginning of the west’s ascendancy to the present day.

In the British empire and the US, conquest was seen as proof of God’s preference for the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’. Their French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch imperial rivals thought they were preferred in the same way. 

Manifest destiny – imperialism serving God’s will on earth – was coupled with social Darwinism, which did not mean the strong had no sympathy for the weak. On the contrary, conquests allowed imperialists to deliver the benefits of civilization and progress to the heathen and barbarians far from their borders. ‘What we are doing for you’ and not ‘what we are doing to you’ was the moral justification. Their invasions were explicitly Christian, even though as Catholics or Protestants, they abused each other inside the Christian club. 

Other civilizations were scarcely recognized or were defamed. Few Christians would have questioned the leading 19th-century British orientalist, Sir William Muir, when he wrote that "the sword of Muhammed, and the Kor'an, are the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty, and the Truth which the world has yet known."

Technology and not morality, except in the minds of the bearers of western civilization, explained western victories. At Omdurman in 1898, spears and flintlocks were no match for the mass death delivered by the Maxim guns lined up on the battlefield. Some 11,000 Sudanese warriors were cut down in a few hours, unable to get anywhere near the British frontline. Fewer than 50 British soldiers died. The Sudanese wounded were left to die on the battlefield if they could not crawl away to safety. Winston Churchill, who was there, regarded the outcome as the triumph of science over barbarism. 

Someone else who was present, the British journalist, G.A. Henty, had a different understanding of what lay behind the British victory: at heart, he thought the British are barbarians, too, capable of any cruelty to get what they want. Omdurman was not exceptional but typical of the gross imbalance when native populations attempted to defend themselves against invading armies. In Algeria, the Mujahidin resisting the French were so short of ammunition that they had to fashion bullets by coating date pits with lead. From the super modern British naval force anchored off Alexandria in 1882 to the missiles and ‘smart bombs’ that rained down on Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003, superior technology alone explains the domination of the west. 

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In the Middle East and North Africa, the ‘west’ has been a perpetually running machine of death and destruction for two centuries. Scarcely any part of the region has managed to avoid its destructive embrace. ‘Why do they hate us?’ was the question asked after 9/11. Looking at the bloody record, the response should surely be ‘Why wouldn’t they?’. 

In fact, the west is not “hated” as long as it stays in the west. What has embittered its victims is its endless meddling in the affairs of countries far from the borders of any ‘western’ country, its murderous wars, its greed and hypocrisy, and its continuing support for the zionist settler colony it established in the wake of the First World War. 

Far worse than Algerian or white South African apartheid settler colonialism, this dagger driven into the very heart of the Middle East has been a motor of death and destruction from the beginning, down to the slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza last week. They are only the latest of countless thousands of child victims of the zionist settler colony in Palestine and the countries around its borders. Who could look at the faces of these innocents and not feel outraged at what these cowards have done? 

But the ‘west’ is not outraged. These children are not its children. Their names are not given and their faces are not shown because readers or viewers seeing these sweet innocent faces would be outraged, and zionist lobbies everywhere would bombard editors with complaints. That cannot be allowed, but the slaughter of Palestinian children can be. 

The erstwhile feminist columnists writing for the media on the rights of women and children around the world have nothing to say when it comes to the situation of the women and children of Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or any other Middle East country torn apart by the ‘west’ in conjunction with the occupiers of Palestine. Is this because they are Muslim? The question certainly needs to be asked.

So it is well past time for the ‘west’ to be called to account. After two centuries, the message has surely been driven home that it cannot be trusted. It has been said a thousand times before, but the Arab and Muslim worlds need to close ranks against this remorseless force in their histories. This also means calling to account the Arab regimes who pay lip service to the Palestine cause but, more openly than ever, are betraying it. 

The global order is undergoing epochal change. All the component parts of the ‘west’ have had their day in the imperial sun; Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Now only the US is left but the light is fading fast. The US will not let go easily because empires never do. After only 22 years, the ‘new American century’ is already grinding to a halt. However, with an addled president in the White House and a team of deluded foreign policy advisors, the US is as dangerous as a wounded snake. It has been outmaneuvered by Russia in Syria and Ukraine and with insane talk in the US and the UK of war with Russia and/or China, a war that would quickly become nuclear, the ‘west’ is closing its half millennium of global dominance by bringing the world to a point even more threatening than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.