The Liquidation of Hope: Gaza’s Televised Agony

Human Wrongs Watch By Raïs Neza Boneza – TRANSCEND Media Service*

4 Aug 2025 – The sheer, unrelenting horror unfolding in Gaza is not unique in its scale of human suffering. Sudan has endured catastrophic famine for over a year, reaching the same “fifth stage of starvation” Gaza now tragically enters.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Every second of august, under the GENOCOST celebration , the Congolese community and its allies around the world come together to honor the memory of the victims of the Congolese genocide.

Congo bears the deep scars of genocide commemorated just days ago, its cry for “Justice, Remembrance, and Dignity” echoing into a seemingly indifferent void. Yet, Gaza possesses a singular, gruesome distinction: it is televised.

This is the core of its unbearable outrage. Gaza shatters the veil of plausible deniability. The suffering is not hidden in the “heart of darkness,” whispered by desperate refugees.

It is broadcast live, in high definition, onto our different screens – the dismembered children, the wailing parents, the pulverized infrastructure.

The world sees. It knows. And this undeniable visibility transforms Gaza into something far more profound than a humanitarian catastrophe; it becomes a global case study on the current state of humanity itself.

The history of a litany of liquidated humanity:

To understand the gravity of this moment, we must confront the uncomfortable historical continuum from the past 600 years which present a chilling pattern: the systematic “liquidation of segments of humanity.”

The genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, erased from dominant narratives; the transatlantic slave trade, codifying human beings as “movable goods” under France’s Code Noir – these were not aberrations, but manifestations of a pervasive mindset.

This mindset is one where “the bigger the crime, the more money we are going to make.” It is a philosophy of dehumanization for profit and power, where certain lives are deemed expendable.

This history is not past; its legacy poisons the present. We see it in the selective application of international justice – the ICC disproportionately targeting Africans or “generic Africans” (those deemed peripheral enough to treat with similar disregard).

We see it in the hollow rhetoric of powers championing human rights institutions while refusing to join them. We see it in the persistent framing of the oppressed as inherently “violent,” while the structural violence inflicted upon them remains obscured.

And today the shattering of hope

Gaza, therefore, is not an isolated tragedy. It is the terrifying culmination of this historical trajectory, broadcast in real-time. Its gruesomeness lies not merely in the death toll, but in what it reveals and what it destroys:

– one, the illusion of empathy: The world witnesses the most vulnerable – children, babies – being “eliminated in the worst ways ever” on a mass scale. Global protests erupt, yet the suffering continues unabated.

Gaza proves, devastatingly, that humanity currently lacks the collective will, the “herd empathy,” to stop suffering even when it is undeniable and visceral. We see, yet we fail to act decisively.

– Two, the liquidation of hope: For generations, oppressed peoples – the Rohingya, the Yazidis, the Congolese, the Sudanese, the Haitians – have clung to a fragile hope: “If only they could see us, know our suffering, then surely humanity would intervene.” Gaza severs this lifeline.

If the world, confronted with such televised horror, cannot muster the empathy and political will to stop it, what hope remains for those suffering in the shadows? Gaza extinguishes the belief that visibility guarantees salvation.

– Three, the definition of humanity: Gaza holds up a mirror, reflecting a brutal truth. This is humanity, right now. It is a humanity capable of watching genocide unfold live, expressing outrage, yet proving powerless or unwilling to fundamentally alter its course.

The institutions built to prevent such horrors are exposed as fractured and susceptible to the very power dynamics that enable the suffering.

Beyond humanitarianism: The Imperative of Mindset Change

Demanding humanitarian aid for Gaza, while necessary for immediate survival, doesn’t dismantle the structures permitting its destruction.

The core challenge is transforming the mindset – the deeply ingrained belief systems that normalize the dehumanization and liquidation of “the other” for political gain, economic profit, or ideological supremacy.

This requires confronting history honestly, not liquidating it for convenience. It means centering thinkers like Frantz Fanon, who diagnosed this pathology of violence and dehumanization over sixty years ago.

It demands rejecting the selective application of justice and the hypocritical language of “humanitarianism” used to mask interventions serving vested interests.

Healing, as hinted regarding the legacy of slavery, requires acknowledging the wound in its full, painful reality – a process actively resisted by those invested in maintaining the status quo.

Humanity on the Brink

Gaza is more than a conflict; it is a verdict. It demonstrates that despite centuries of philosophical advancement and institutional development, humanity remains tragically unevolved in its capacity for collective, empathetic action against overwhelming, visible injustice.

The televised slaughter of innocents reveals a species not yet capable of “herd empathy,” still governed by the ancient, brutal calculus of power and indifference that fueled historical genocides and enslavement.

The outrage of Gaza is the outrage of realization. It forces us to confront the uncomfortable question: Have we progressed at all? Or are we witnessing, an accelerating “process toward the liquidation of humanity”?

Gaza doesn’t just kill its people; it kills the hope that humanity, when faced with undeniable evil, will inevitably choose the light. Restoring that hope demands nothing less than a radical reckoning with our history and a fundamental transformation of the mindset that brought us here.

The televised test is ongoing, and we are failing. There are still children that are dying now, tonight and will die tomorrow…

What hope does the rest of the world have? What hope does Sudan or Congo have? What hope for Haiti or for you and I, for us? That’s what makes it so horrific. The question is whether we can, or even want to, learn before the liquidation is complete.

*This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 11 Aug 2025: TMS: The Liquidation of Hope: Gaza’s Televised Agony 2025 Human Wrongs Watch

Source: https://human-wrongs-watch.net/2025/08/12/the-liquidation-of-hope-gazas-televised-agony/