Europe’s Racial Capitalism, Its Pathetic Liberal Fantasy and Its Obscene Enjoyment

Banner: A protest against the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. East Gaza Strip, July 4, 2023. Photo Anas-Mohammed, Shutterstock

Susan George, the towering revolutionary American intellectual (June 1934 – February 2026) who passed away at the ripe age of 91 in her adopted home of Europe last week, once observed that the European Union has no human values with which it conducts its policies.

The late Dr George might as well have extended her scathing conclusion to Europe at large, not just a bureaucratic cluster of political states whose collective raison d’etre is to continue with the savage continent’s dishonorable Civilization which radical Black intellectuals call “racial capitalism”.

Europe likes to imagine itself as history’s reformed conscience: post-fascist, post-colonial, humanitarian by design. It speaks the language of universal rights fluently and performs moral clarity when the casting is convenient. Nowhere is this self-image more carefully protected—and more brutally exposed—than in Europe’s response to Palestine.

The dominant European posture is not simple indifference. It is something more structured, more invested, and more disturbing: a racist fantasy that renders Palestinian life disposable while allowing Europe to enjoy the comforts of innocence, profit, and moral superiority all at once.

A similarly dark racist ideology patronized by Nazi Germany that was once targeted against the continent’s unwanted Jews, is sweeping across “Christian Europe” today.  It has now morphed into anti-Palestinian and Islamophobia and serves as the Israel-First policies of European states.

Today the Jewish supremacist nation of “eternal victims” is now the darling of Europe.   Never mind that such a vile state has institutionalized apartheid against all non-Jews and commissioned its own “Gaza Holocaust,” in the words of the renowned American scholar Dr Norman Finkelstein, a son of the two Polish Jewish survivors.

Obscene in the technical sense

The enjoyment on this savage continent is not sadistic pleasure in the sights and tales of Others’ suffering. It is obscene in the technical sense—operating beneath official values, sustained by denial, and stabilized by racial hierarchy. Europe does not need to cheer Palestinian death; it needs only to normalize it, abstract it, and insist that it is “complicated.”

I encountered this logic firsthand in a heated conversation with a German friend. He spoke passionately—morally, emotionally—about the war in Ukraine: the injustice of invasion, the sanctity of sovereignty, the urgency of European support. Billions in aid were not only justified; they were necessary. But when I mentioned European complicity in the destruction of Gaza, his tone shifted instantly. He grew angry, defensive. That, he insisted, was “a different case.”

No clear explanation followed. Only the familiar gestures: history, security, complexity. The discussion shut down precisely where Europe’s self-image was threatened. What struck me was not personal inconsistency, but ideological coherence. Ukraine fit seamlessly into Europe’s moral narrative. Gaza did not—and therefore had to be excluded.

The fantasy begins with racial placement. Ukrainians are imagined as people “like us”: European, modern, fully human. Palestinians are imagined as excessive—too angry, too political, too emotional, too violent to qualify for uncomplicated empathy. Their deaths are therefore never simply crimes; they are always contextualized, relativized, or explained away as unfortunate consequences of their own condition.

But racist fantasy does more than dehumanize its targets. It also obscures the real operations of capitalism. By framing Palestinian suffering as the product of culture, religion, or endless conflict, Europe hides the material mechanisms at work: arms markets, security industries, surveillance technologies, border regimes, and geopolitical investments. Racism transforms political economy into moral drama. Exploitation disappears behind identity, and profit hides behind “security.”

Blindness works in two directions

Those who suffer racism are pushed to understand their dispossession as fate, pathology, or endless crisis rather than as structured extraction and control. Those who benefit are trained to see their advantage as accidental, regrettable, or external to the system that enriches them. Racist fantasy thus protects capitalism from scrutiny by redirecting attention away from who profits, how value is extracted, and why violence is reproduced.1

This makes possible a second move: moral theater. Europe positions itself as the sad but reasonable observer, endlessly calling for restraint, dialogue, and balance. This posture is emotionally convenient. It allows outrage without implication, sympathy without responsibility, concern without cost. Europe can watch devastation unfold while preserving the belief that it stands outside the violence.

But Europe is not outside. It is inside—materially, politically, economically. Arms contracts are signed. Surveillance technologies are tested. Borders are refined. Capital flows quietly through destruction and reconstruction alike. European corporations benefit from the very conditions European leaders publicly lament.

Here the obscene enjoyment takes shape. The knowledge of complicity is not absent; it is disavowed. Europeans largely know that their institutions enable the devastation of Palestinian life. Yet this knowledge is suspended, held at arm’s length, prevented from becoming politically binding. “I know very well,” the logic goes, “but it is not really my problem.”

This split—knowing and not knowing at once—is not a failure of information. It is an achievement of ideology. Racist fantasy makes capitalist violence appear either inevitable or unrelated, while liberal moralism absorbs discomfort through language. Europe can benefit from war and occupation while retaining a self-image of decency.

Language does the rest. Palestinians do not die; they “perish.” Homes are not destroyed; they are “targeted.” Occupation becomes a “dispute.” Mass killing becomes “self-defense.” Through this vocabulary, horror is managed. Enough suffering is shown to sustain Europe’s humanitarian identity, but never enough proximity to force accountability.

The aggressive repression of Palestinian solidarity across Europe reveals how fragile this fantasy truly is. If Europe were merely indifferent, protests would pose no threat. But naming complicity collapses the comfortable separation between values and interests. It exposes the obscene underside of European moralism: that innocence is maintained not by ignorance, but by force.

What is at stake, ultimately, is not Palestine alone. Palestine is the site where Europe’s unresolved contradictions converge: colonial history disavowed but not dismantled; racial hierarchy denied but operational; capitalist violence outsourced and depoliticized. Palestinian life becomes the price paid to keep Europe’s self-image intact.

Europe does not fail its values in Palestine. Palestine reveals what those values have been calibrated to protect.

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The obscene enjoyment lies precisely there: in being humane without sacrifice, moral without risk, and enriched without responsibility—while insisting, with practiced solemnity, that none of this was ever Europe’s doing.

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As Todd McGowan put it, “(t)he other benefit of the racist fantasy for capitalist society is that it has the same function in reverse for those who are racial others. It works for both racists and the victims of racism in related ways, even though it places them in opposed positions within its framework. If one is a Jew in German society in the 1930s, for instance, the racist fantasy provides one with figures responsible for one’s exploitation. One would turn one’s focus to Nazism as the source of oppression and take it off capitalism. In this way, the prevalence of the racist fantasy hides the working of capitalism for the victims of racism just as it does for the oppressors.”

Ray Thek
An exiled Myanmar Artist

See Todd McGowan, The Racist Fantasy: Unconscious Roots of Hatred. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.