Is it possible to be an unconscious racist?

There is a phrase I would like you to hold in your mind. "Deep and unconscious racism". I came across it in this paper last week, in an article by that redoubtable campaigner for truth, John Pilger. I have always, until recently, admired John Pilger and been prepared to take from him on trust even that which it is difficult to corroborate. OK, so he might be wrong in this or that particular, but his doggedness is its own virtue, his scepticism a precious commodity in a gullible world. I ardently admire his delivery as well: his sheet-metal, garage-door Australianness cutting through the bullshit like a flame of ice. Whether you need a flame of ice to cut through bullshit is also, of course, my point.

"Deep and unconscious racism" isn't his phrase. He borrows it, with the proper acknowledgments, from the Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi. Quoting from Palestinian writers confers a solemn authenticity on any argument these days, much like that once conferred by Jewish writers speaking from personal experience about the Holocaust. They become holy, these prophet-scribes deemed to be reporting from the front line of oppression, their incarnation, once you cite them, adding a little frisson of sanctification to your own prose.

Understand that I begrudge neither party his or her effect. But as Pilger himself teaches us, scepticism is a precious commodity in a gullible world.

The deep and unconscious racism of which Karmi and Pilger speak, is, you won't be surprised to hears, ours. The West's. A "deep and unconscious racism that imbues every aspect of Western policy towards Iraq".

Just a question, but is it possible to be an "unconscious" racist? Leave out the "deep". If it's unconscious, it's bound to be deep. And I'm not unwilling to accept depth on behalf of the West anyway, given that the more usual charge against us is shallowness. But if you are not conscious of your racism, can you be a racist? I'm not saying you can't, I'm simply wondering. If you can, that would explain how figures from the ancient world come to be accused of modern crimes. You know the sort of thing: Alexander the Great was a cultural hegemonist, Moses a Zionist imperialist, Nero a homophobe, Socrates an elitist and a paedophile. Ignorance of the vocabulary of the misdemeanour, you see, being no defence.

Here's the trouble with the unconscious: once it's accepted that you've got one, anyone can accuse it of harbouring anything, including an anachronism.

That aside, one proof of our "deep unconscious racism", according to Pilger and Karmi, is our demonisation, "beyond reason", of Saddam Hussein – "a petty local chieftain, albeit a brutal and ruthless one". From writers' "albeits"do you learn the complexion of their minds. Whoever would seek entry into their deep unconscious should try knocking on the trapdoor marked "albeit".

In this case the syntactical prevarication is very clear: to grant the evil of Saddam Hussein is to grant the West the justice of its demonisation; in which case it is not beyond reason, in which further case it is unnecessary to adduce racism as a cause of it. Not to acknowledge his brutality and ruthlessness however, would be wanting in sympathy for the however many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis he has killed. (A want of sympathy characteristic of the unconsciously racist West.) So it must be granted, albeit in a sort of moral gulp.

The status of Saddam Hussein's villainy has proved equally problematic for another writer given to throwing the word racism around like a custard pie at a circus. "A tin-pot dictator," Arundhati Roy called him the other week. The point being, as it is for Karmi and Pilger, that the bona-fide bastards, the real dangers to the peace, are us. We of the deeply racist West.

That Iraqis themselves took their dictator a little less Chaplinesquely, whether they were for him or against, there is now ample evidence to accept. I am not a complete fool. I do not believe everything I see on television. Our eyes deceive us. The Iraqi shouting his love of Bush – "Bush, Bush!" – is likely to have other attitudes as well. If we can run on double lines, now prompted by what we think we think, and now by our deep unconscious, so can Iraqis. Indeed it would be racist to think otherwise.

But the minimising of Saddam Hussein's systematic cruelty – tin-pot dictator, petty local chieftain, etc – is now exposed for what it is: a wickedness in itself, perpetrated opportunely for reasons of anti-West ideology only. All's fair in love and war, I accept that. But those who dirty themselves this way should drop, at the very least, their mask of righteousness.

It would help to give the charge of racism, unconscious or otherwise, a rest. Not least as either side to this, as to every conflict, can find instances of it in the other. The two Iraqi women who sought martyrdom as suicide bombers – only too conscious, alas, of what they were about to do – listed Zionism as paramount among the evils they were hell-bent to avenge. Was there no racism implied in that? No racism in the anti-Jewish propaganda to which they will undoubtedly have been exposed since they were children? No racism in their self-imposed blindness to the fact that the Israel they cannot stomach exists by virtue of the Jews they themselves, among other Middle Eastern nations, expelled?

Asked on television why he was returning from the Lebanon to support the tyrant from whom he'd fled, an Iraqi said he wanted to make sure not a single Jew trod upon Iraqi soil. Oh for some deep unconscious racism there! And do not say that he was but a single man, and that we are a system. It takes a system to stuff murderous hatred into a single man.

When it comes to bigotry, there is no innocent party. Not even John Pilger who by the day descends into a perverse loathing, not of the hated other, but of one's hated own. That, too, is racism.