In a symbolic joining of older and contemporary struggles against apartheid, Francesca Albanese delivered the Nelson Mandela lecture this autumn. Did her address manage to bury the fiction of the ‘liberal world order’ once and for all?
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Albanese has been vilified and even sanctioned in Western capitals for saying what so many can see–that Israel’s war in Gaza is genocidal, and that the international system designed to prevent such crimes is paralysed when the perpetrator is an ally of empire. Her presence in South Africa, invited to honour Mandela, was itself an act of historical continuity. Like Mandela before her, she spoke not merely of law and rights but of power and hypocrisy, of the need to confront domination wherever it wears the mask of civilisation. Refusing euphemism, she described the situation in Gaza as apocalyptic–in the original Greek sense of revelation. ‘The genocide,’ she said, ‘has pierced the veil of Maya,’ exposing not an aberration but the structure of a world order… Liberalism learned to manage its contradictions through distance. Violence was outsourced to the frontier, the colony, the periphery. At home, the rule of law; abroad, the law of rule. The Enlightenment’s faith in universal humanity coexisted with the assumption that certain peoples were not yet–or not fully–human. John Stuart Mill’s 1859 essay On Liberty remains a canonical text, still taught as an exemplary argument for freedom, yet Mill was explicit that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.’ John Brown was executed in the same year that Mill published this essay. Racism has always been a choice.q From its origin, liberal freedom was never universal; it was always bounded by race and empire. That psychic architecture endures today, when the deaths of tens of thousands in Gaza are rationalised as collateral damage, and international law is weaponised by the West. Albanese noted that her European education had never taught her that the Holocaust was preceded by the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia–or that the dehumanisation practised by European fascism had its prototype in the colonies. The idea of a superior race, she warned, did not end with the Nazis; it ‘continues to fester in the world today.’ Gaza is not an exception to Western civilisation but part of its continuity–one revelation in a long, colonial apocalypse.
