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<span class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-title gmail-field--type-string gmail-field--label-hidden"><span class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-title gmail-field--type-string gmail-field--label-hidden"><font size="4">Iran and the Psychopathology of White Supremacy</font></span></span></a></div><div class="gmail-taxonomy"><br></div>
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<span><a href="https://blackagendareport.com/author/ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist"> Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist</a></span>
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04 Mar 2026
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<a href="https://blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/11%20845x400.png" aria-label="{"alt":"Pete Hegseth"}" role="button" title="Pete Hegseth" class="gmail-colorbox gmail-cboxElement" aria-controls="colorbox-Dyx645HQM9o"><img id="gmail-colorbox-Dyx645HQM9o" src="https://blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/11%20845x400.png" width="408" height="193" alt="Pete Hegseth" style="margin-right: 0px;">
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<div class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-field-image-caption gmail-field--type-string gmail-field--label-hidden gmail-field__item">Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan
Caine speak during a news conference at the Pentagon.</div>
<div class="gmail-clearfix gmail-text-formatted gmail-field gmail-field--name-body gmail-field--type-text-with-summary gmail-field--label-hidden gmail-field__item"><p dir="ltr"><em>Western threats against Iran and other nations reveal the persistence of white supremacist ideology.</em></p>
<p dir="ltr">The sincere belief that the sadistic brutalization of the
Palestinian people would sever their connection to their land; that a
sixty-year siege on Cuba would compel its people to abandon their
revolution; or that assassinating Iran\u2019s revolutionary and spiritual
leadership would force the country to surrender its sovereignty to its
historic tormentors in the United States and the Zionist ethno-state of
Israel\u2014these are not simply policy miscalculations. They are
manifestations of what I call the <strong>psychopathology of white supremacy</strong>.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This psychopathology is not reducible to individual
prejudice. It is a racialized, narcissistic cognitive disorder embedded
in the ideological and institutional architecture of Western power. It
centers Europe and its settler extensions as the apex of human
development and renders its adherents incapable of perceiving objective
reality when confronted with non-European resistance. While rooted in
the historical experience of Europe and its encounters with non-European
people during the expansion of European power, it can affect anyone
socialized within the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the
Pan-European colonial project.</p>
<p dir="ltr">As a non-material conceptual frame, it nevertheless
produces material consequences. Since the first sustained contact
between emerging European powers and the non-European world, this
affliction has shaped policies that devastated societies, cultures, and
millions of lives. It ensures that Western decision-makers repeatedly
construct strategies that are counterproductive even to their own
long-term interests when dealing with non-European peoples.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The disastrous decision to attack and escalate against Iran
exemplifies this dynamic. It reflects arrogance and hubris born of
centuries of assumed supremacy, temporarily reinforced by episodic
tactical gains elsewhere such as Venezuela. Yet this posture ignores
profound global shifts in power. Western policymakers are unable\u2014or
unwilling\u2014to recognize that the conditions that once enabled them to
impose their will unilaterally no longer exist. They act as if the world
remains frozen in the immediate post-Cold War moment, when U.S.
hegemony appeared uncontested.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This cognitive distortion is inseparable from white
supremacy itself, which operates ideologically and structurally.
Ideologically, white supremacy posits that the descendants of Europe
represent the highest stage of civilization, that their institutions,
religions, and social systems are inherently superior. Structurally, it
is expressed through global institutions and arrangements that reproduce
Western dominance: the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World
Trade Organization, NATO, the global banking system, and dollar
hegemony. These institutions function as material instruments for
maintaining global white power.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Following the Second World War, the Nuremberg Principles
and the United Nations Charter affirmed that all peoples possess the
right to peace, sovereignty, and self-determination. States were not to
interfere in the internal affairs of others. These commitments were
framed as extensions of Enlightenment liberalism. Yet for those
subjected to colonial conquest and racial capitalism, these ideals were
always contradicted by practice. Liberal universalism proclaimed
equality while colonial modernity imposed hierarchy. Still, the myth of
Western moral superiority endured\u2014particularly among Western elites,
their colonized intermediaries, and privileged sectors of the white
working classes who benefited materially from imperial plunder.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Gaza has torn away the remaining veil. The spectacle of
mass destruction, rationalized and defended in the name of
\u201ccivilization,\u201d exposes the moral contradictions long embedded in
Western political culture. When Western powers felt compelled to
maintain the appearance of humanitarian restraint, there were at least
rhetorical limits on their conduct. In the current era of openly lawless
global fascism led by the United States and Israel, those self-imposed
constraints have disappeared.</p>
<p dir="ltr">We must harbor no illusions about the nature of Western
power or its pathological commitment to maintaining white supremacy. A
commitment that has a cross-class character. The dehumanization of
non-European peoples has always provided the ideological justification
for enslavement, settler conquest in the Americas, colonial
consolidation in Africa and Asia, and contemporary doctrines such as
American exceptionalism. The same biblical imagery invoked in Gaza
echoes the language of Manifest Destiny. The logic is consistent: the
lives of non-Europeans are expendable in the service of a civilizational
mission atoned by a white Christian God.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The racial dimension of imperial aggression becomes
particularly clear in cases such as Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. These are
not merely geopolitical rivals; they are targets marked by racialized
narratives of irrationality, authoritarianism and political fanaticism.
Narratives that are not just constructed by rightist forces but embraced
by forces that define themselves as left, and anti-imperialist. The
resistance that emanates from global South forces challenges not only
U.S. strategic interests but the myth of Western indispensability in
both its left and right expressions.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Iran and Venezuela, working with BRICS partners, have
developed mechanisms to circumvent sanctions through alternative trade
arrangements and digital currencies. They have demonstrated that
resource-rich nations can survive economic warfare. Venezuela holds the
largest proven oil reserves in the world; Iran ranks among the top
three. Iraq also occupies a critical position. Control over energy
resources remains central to U.S. strategy, particularly in relation to
China. The contest is not simply about regional influence but about
preventing the emergence of a multipolar order that would weaken dollar
dominance and, by extension, U.S. global leverage.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Dollar hegemony has been foundational to postwar U.S.
economic growth and its capacity to sustain massive deficits. With
national debt approaching unprecedented levels and annual deficits
soaring, maintaining control over energy markets and reserve currency
status is not optional\u2014it is structural, and in fact, existential for
Western white hegemony under the leadership of the U.S. Therefore, what
is presented as a security doctrine is in fact an economic imperative.</p>
<p dir="ltr">\u201cFull spectrum dominance,\u201d articulated in U.S. national
security strategy, calls for preventing the rise of any regional power
capable of challenging U.S. supremacy. This doctrine explains the
relentless pressure on Iran in West Asia and Venezuela in the Americas.
It also clarifies U.S. interventions in Africa, including
destabilization efforts that ensure regional powers remain subordinate.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Security-first narratives\u2014counter-terrorism,
counter-narcotics, border enforcement\u2014provide ideological cover. But
beneath them lies a deeper crisis of Western capitalism. As that crisis
intensifies, fascist restructuring becomes more explicit. Opposition to
imperial policy is criminalized. Surveillance expands. Anti-terror and
public order laws are weaponized. Domestically, Indigenous,
African/Black, migrant, and labor movements are reframed as security
threats. Internationally, sanctions regimes function as collective
punishment, imposing siege conditions on entire populations.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The psychopathology of white supremacy fuels this process.
Unable to accept limits, Western elites double down on coercion. Yet
this very overreach contains its own contradiction. By misreading global
realities and underestimating the resolve of targeted nations, Western
powers accelerate their own strategic decline. Each failed intervention
erodes legitimacy. Each sanction that pushes nations toward alternative
financial systems weakens the architecture of dollar dominance.</p>
<p dir="ltr">For those engaged in social justice and radical struggle,
these developments pose urgent questions. Can justice be achieved
domestically without confronting imperial power internationally? Can
movements ignore the racialized foundations of global capitalism while
seeking reform within its structures? The consolidation of fascism
abroad and repression at home are not separate phenomena; they are
mutually reinforcing.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Renewed U.S. dominance, pursued through militarism and
economic warfare, reshapes the terrain of struggle. It narrows
democratic space, intensifies polarization, and demands clarity. There
can be no effective oppositional politics that refuses to confront the
ideological and material consequences of normalized white supremacy.
Anti-racism detached from anti-imperialism becomes hollow.
Anti-imperialism that ignores racial hierarchy is incomplete and
reactionary.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The psychopathology of white supremacy, paradoxically, may
be its own undoing. By distorting perception, it drives policies that
hasten the decline of the \u201ccollective West.\u201d By denying the humanity of
others, it strengthens their resolve. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and
Palestine demonstrate that sovereignty cannot be bombed or sanctioned
out of existence. Resistance exposes the limits of the Pan European
colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The choice before radical movements is stark. Either we
confront fascism\u2014domestically and internationally\u2014and challenge the
structures that sustain it, or we drift into accommodation and become
complicit in our own subordination. History suggests that empires rarely
relinquish power voluntarily. They must be compelled by organized,
principled resistance grounded in an unflinching analysis of power.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The era of illusions is over. What is required is clarity\u2014and the responsibility to act.</p>
<p dir="ltr">No Compromise, No Retreat!!</p>
<p dir="ltr"><em><strong>Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing
columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the
North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on
the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of
the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).</strong></em></p>
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