What imperialism consistently fails to grasp is that the very cultures it seeks to dehumanise are precisely where peoples draw their strength, Tings Chak writes.
The turn from liberal universalism to open civilisational supremacy is not a sign of renewed Western confidence, it is a symptom of hegemonic decline. When an order can no longer lead through the attractiveness of its ideas, it reaches for cruder instruments: military force and cultural weaponisation.
In February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood at the Munich Security Conference and used the word “civilisation” twelve times in his speech, celebrating “five centuries” of Western expansion, describing decolonisation as a catastrophe driven by “godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings,” urging Europeans not to be “shackled by guilt and shame” over their colonial past, and calling on them to help “renew the greatest civilisation in human history.”
Rubio’s speech deserves to be taken seriously, and not merely as rhetoric. For decades, Western hegemony operated through the language of universalism: human rights, international law and the rules-based order. The shift to open civilisational supremacy tells us something important about the condition of that hegemony.
At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, where I co-coordinate the Asia office and our cultural department, we have been engaged in what we call the “battle of ideas and emotions” — the cultural and ideological dimensions through which hegemony is both constructed and contested. This research speaks directly to what is at stake in the current moment: the weaponisation of culture, the dehumanisation of entire civilisations, and the dangerous consequences that follow.
So why does a hegemonic power need to dehumanise? A system that claims to embody universal rights and liberties cannot openly maintain regimes of violent domination — not unless it first places its targets outside the category of the human. Not merely as inferior, but as the negation of its values, as an existential threat. Once this is accomplished, violence ceases to register as violence. It becomes civilisational defence.
This logic is operating with devastating clarity today. In Gaza, Israeli leaders have continuously used dehumanising language, like “human animals”, to justify its genocide of the Palestinian people. And on 7 April, President Trump declared: “A whole civilisation will die tonight” — speaking of Iran, a country with one of the oldest continuous cultural traditions in human history.
The Palestinian writer and PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed by an Israeli car bomb in Beirut in 1972, analysed this process with great precision. In his study On Zionist Literature, he showed that the novels came before the bulldozers. Decades of literature, cinema, and journalism had constructed Palestinians as undeserving of their own land — and this cultural work preceded and enabled their physical dispossession. The tropes were never original; they were recycled from European colonial literature about Africa and Asia. Dehumanisation, in other words, is an industrial process with interchangeable parts, deployed against whichever people the hegemonic order needs to target.
Once dehumanisation has done its work, what follows is not only the destruction of people but the deliberate destruction of their culture. In Gaza, every university has been destroyed. Over a thousand mosques. Libraries, archives, heritage sites — including the Tell Umm Amer monastery, Gaza’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, which UNESCO inscribed through an emergency procedure during the war itself. UN experts have called this process “scholasticide” — the systematic elimination of a society’s capacity for knowledge, memory, and cultural reproduction. This is what dehumanisation makes possible. It is not a metaphor.
What does the need to dehumanise tell us about the condition of the imperialist power itself? The Martinican poet and anti-colonial thinker Aimé Césaire argued that colonisation “decivilises the coloniser.” A civilisation that justifies colonisation, and therefore force, he wrote in Discourse on Colonialism, “is already a sick civilisation, a civilisation which is morally diseased.” This is a striking inversion of Rubio’s claim to represent “the greatest civilisation in human history.”
The turn from universalism to civilisational supremacy is not a sign of renewed confidence. It is a symptom of hegemonic decline. When an order can no longer lead through the attractiveness of its ideas, and when its economic, technological, and productive advantages erode, it reaches for cruder instruments: military force abroad and cultural demonisation, both at home and internationally.
The new cold war against China follows precisely this logic. As someone who is Chinese, who has studied the long history of Sinophobia, I recognise in today’s anti-China rhetoric patterns that stretch back two centuries: the Chinese as cheap labour, as diseased, as thieves and spies. These narratives were constructed to justify a colonial division of labour, were weaponised during the Cold War, and are being revived today because old forms of economic and technological dominance are no longer sufficient. The US Department of Justice’s “China Initiative,” launched in 2018, disproportionately targeted scientists of Chinese descent; approximately 90% of those caught up in the programme were ethnically Chinese. Thousands of researchers left the country, not because of what they had done, but because of who they were. This is driven by the same hegemonic anxiety that is playing out militarily in West Asia.
Across these different contexts, what we are seeing is that dehumanisation is not only morally repugnant, it is also analytically bankrupt. It systematically underestimates the peoples it targets. Consider what has just happened with Iran. After weeks of a war launched without provocation, the United States was unable to break Iran’s resistance. A president who declared that a whole civilisation would die that night was compelled, by that same evening, to accept a ceasefire. Iran countered with a ten-point peace plan. The civilisation that was supposed to disappear instead forced its adversary to the negotiating table.
What imperialism consistently fails to grasp is that the very cultures it seeks to dehumanise are precisely where peoples draw their strength. Iran’s resistance is inseparable from its deep civilisational and cultural heritage. The anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century, from Algeria to Vietnam to Palestine to China, drew not only on political organisation but on cultural traditions that gave meaning and coherence to the struggle. As Kanafani argued, a culture produced under siege conditions is inherently a form of resistance: to continue to create, to think, to organise is to insist on one’s existence. Not because these societies possess some timeless civilisational essence—that would be a mystification—but because culture is a living practice, renewed daily by people who refuse the roles assigned to them.
Understanding both the machinery of dehumanisation and the living traditions through which peoples resist it is a precondition for building new avenues of cultural and intellectual cooperation outside the hegemonic framework. This is the work that requires serious study, and serious solidarity.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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