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After a brief flirtation with civilization — following the discrediting of White Supremacy after World War II — the West slips back into its oldest suit: violence, death, and depravity.
The thin veneer of liberal interventionism has shattered. What remains is the old, familiar face of Western empire — stripped of pretense, gorged on violence, and answerable to no one.
The missiles fell on Tehran today. They fell on Isfahan, on Qom, on Kermanshah, on Karaj. The United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran, with explosions heard and seen across Tehran. U.S. officials confirmed that the strikes were coordinated, describing them as “not a small strike.” They fell while diplomats in Geneva still had the ink wet on their talking points from the last round of negotiations. According to an Israeli defence official quoted by Reuters, the attacks had been planned for months and the launch date decided weeks ago, even as the US and Iran carried out negotiations. The talks were theater. The armada was real.
This is the face that does not change. It is not the face of democracy, or freedom, or human rights. It is the face of conquest. It is the face that the Taíno saw when Columbus made landfall. It is the face the Congolese saw under Leopold. It is the face the Bengalis saw under Churchill. It is the face the Vietnamese and the Iraqis and the Libyans and the Afghans saw in turn. It is the face of Western power when it decides it wants something you have, or when it decides that your existence, your sovereignty, your refusal to kneel, constitutes an intolerable offense against the natural order of domination. That order was not built on the Enlightenment. It was built on the slave ship and the cannon.
The West’s Brief Flirtation with Civilization
For a brief historical parenthesis — a few decades after the Holocaust exposed the logical endpoint of European racial supremacy — the empire put on a suit. It called itself the “international community.” It established institutions — the United Nations, the World Bank, NATO — that were designed not to constrain power but to dress it in the language of consent. This was the era of “liberal interventionism,” when bombs were dropped in the name of humanitarianism, when entire nations were restructured through “structural adjustment” programs that gutted their public institutions, and when the architects of misery were handed Nobel Peace Prizes and professorships at Ivy League universities. The violence did not stop. It became respectable.
It was respectable to bomb human rights into countries that had not asked for them. It was fashionable to teach neoliberal economics at Harvard while the policies it prescribed hollowed out nations from the inside. It was accepted, without question, that Muslims were civilizational barbarians — entire psychology departments were erected to explain why these people kept fighting us, and the answer was always the same: the “extremist mind,” the pathological Other, the irrational fanatic. Never the resistance of people ground under decades of occupation and humiliation. Never the extremist proxies armed, funded, and deployed by the US-Israeli-Saudi axis whenever destabilization served the imperial interest. The diagnosis was always pointed at the patient. Never at the disease.
But the suit no longer fits, and the empire has stopped pretending.
On 3 January 2026, the US carried out what it called a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela, and President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were captured and flown to New York. As deputy U.S. Marshals led Maduro from the courtroom, the deposed leader looked directly at the cameras and shot back in Spanish: “I am a kidnapped president. I am a prisoner of war.” The world watched a sovereign head of state dragged before an American court — in what Russia’s UN ambassador called the act of a nation that would “proclaim itself as some kind of a supreme judge.” Maduro’s son warned: “If we normalize the kidnapping of a head of state, no country is safe. Today it’s Venezuela. Tomorrow it could be any nation that refuses to submit.” The press, as is its habit, debated legality, precedent, the fine print of the Ker-Frisbie doctrine. It missed the point entirely. The point was power. The point was that no court, no treaty, no parliamentary body had sanctioned this act of imperial aggression. The point was made — and it was intended to be made — not to Venezuela but to every nation on earth that imagined its sovereignty meant anything in the face of American appetite.
“This is trickle-down psychopathy: the nastiness of Western power trickles down into a world saturated with hate and abuse, while the wealth they promised would trickle down through their economics never arrives”
And now Iran…
President Trump has neither congressional authorization nor any basis in international law to attack Iran. Unilateral military action against Iran is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution, which gives the power to declare war to the Congress. There is no standing authorization for the use of military force against Iran, as required by the War Powers Act. Furthermore, the rationale for any U.S. military action against Iran has not been debated, let alone authorized, by the UN Security Council. Recent polling by Quinnipiac reveals that 70 percent of Americans oppose military action on Iran, with just 18 percent in support, and 70 percent think the president should first seek approval from Congress.
None of this matters. None of it has ever mattered, not truly, not when the machinery of Empire decides to move. Congress, as the Brennan Center rightly observed, sleeps. House Speaker Mike Johnson called the War Powers measure “all politics.” Without a supine Congress, we could not have an imperial presidency. Lawmakers are practiced at ducking responsibility, fretting, and orating, but they’re secretly relieved that someone else is acting and taking the heat. The Constitution is a parchment barrier. The UN is a ventriloquist’s dummy with an American hand up its back. The “rules-based international order” is a phrase that means: we make the rules, and we order you to obey.
Look at the trajectory. Look at the arc and do not flinch from what it describes. Syria — dismembered, its infrastructure annihilated, millions scattered across the earth as refugees, its territory carved up between American, Turkish, Russian, and Israeli occupiers. Libya — transformed from Africa’s most prosperous state into an open-air slave market where human beings are auctioned under fluorescent lights. Iraq — a civilization cratered by sanctions that killed half a million children before the first bomb fell in 2003, reduced to a sectarian charnel house by an invasion built on fabricated evidence. Afghanistan — occupied for twenty years, drained, then abandoned overnight with the callousness of a landlord evicting a tenant. Yemen — starved, bombed, blockaded, a nation where children die not from weapons but from the deliberate engineering of famine. Lebanon — battered yet again, its people perpetually made to pay for the geopolitical ambitions of others.
And now Tehran burns.
The apologists will speak of nuclear proliferation, of the threat of a theocratic regime, of the “imminent danger” that has been imminent for thirty years. Trump’s own director of national intelligence recently testified that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” It does not matter. The pretext shifts — weapons of mass destruction, humanitarian intervention, counterterrorism, nonproliferation — but the mechanism is always the same. The mechanism is violence deployed by the powerful against the weak, always cloaked in a language designed to make the aggressor appear as the victim, to make the thief appear as the liberator. Should Iran back down and submit to US demands, Trump — who preys on perceived weakness — would simply move the goalpost. Demands would shift from Iran’s nuclear programme today to its ballistic missiles tomorrow and regime change the day after.
The True Face of 500 Years of European Colonialism
This is what five hundred years of European colonialism actually looked like. Not the sanitized version taught in Western universities, where empire is framed as a regrettable but complex civilizing mission, but the version experienced by the colonized — the kidnapping of entire generations of children, the boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian to save the man” (and to sexually satisfy the abuser), the child laborers in Belgian rubber plantations, the “house servants” who were property in everything but the legal fiction that distinguished them from plantation slaves. The child trafficking was not incidental to empire. It was constitutive. Empire required the destruction of the family, the severing of generational memory, the conversion of human beings into raw material. This was the logic of the transatlantic slave trade, the logic of the residential school, the logic of the stolen generation.
The post-1945 order did not end this logic. It sublimated it. It outsourced the cruelty to client states and proxy forces while the metropole maintained the appearance of civilization. The torture was done in Bagram, in Abu Ghraib, in the black sites scattered across the globe whose locations we will likely never fully know. The extremists were armed in Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets, then armed again in Syria to topple Assad, then armed again wherever the next regime change operation required plausible deniability. The pattern repeats not because policymakers are incompetent but because chaos is the product, not the byproduct. A destabilized nation is a nation that cannot resist extraction.
“It is fascism. It is not “flirting with fascism”. It is not “heading toward fascism.” It is not a deviation from Western civilization. It is its oldest, most persistent expression”
The Psychopathy of the Epstein Class
What I have called elsewhere the psychopathy of Empire is not metaphor. It is diagnosis. This is the Epstein class — the network of billionaires, intelligence operatives, and political fixers who allegedly trafficked children across the United States while sitting in the front row at fundraising galas and policy summits. They were not aberrations. They were the system functioning as designed. The same class that preyed on children at home turned Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya into hellholes run by US soldiers and US-backed extremists who did the same to children and minorities abroad — just as the Zionist colony does to its (child) prisoners today. The cruelty does not stay overseas. It flows downward.
Unsurprisingly, famous influencers now openly flirt with pedophilia.
The wars that shatter societies abroad produce the shattered veterans and the surveillance state at home. The dehumanization of the foreign Other prepares the ground for the dehumanization of the domestic Other — the immigrant, the poor, the dissident. This is trickle-down psychopathy: the nastiness of Western and Zionist power trickles down into a world saturated with hate and abuse, while the wealth they promised would trickle down through their economics never arrives. The abuse trickles. The prosperity never does.
Liberal Interventionism is Dead
And here is the terrible truth that today’s missiles over Tehran confirm: liberal interventionism is dead. It is not dying. It is not in crisis. It is dead. The pretense that the West intervenes to protect civilians, to uphold international law, to defend democracy — this pretense has been abandoned with the same casual indifference with which one discards a worn-out tool. On 13 February 2026, Trump stated that regime change in Iran would be “the best thing that could happen.” To the Iranian people he said “your hour of freedom is at hand… when we are finished take over your government, it will be yours to take.” The language is that of a conqueror distributing spoils. There is no humanitarian framework. There is no multilateral coalition. There is no legal authority. There is only force, and the will to use it, and the expectation that no one will stop it.
The coalition that supports this is instructive: the Zionist ultranationalists who have turned Gaza into the largest open-air prison and death camp in human history, the far-right agitators across Europe and America who have rebranded white supremacy as “Western civilization,” the war profiteers whose stock portfolios swell with each detonation, and the vast apparatus of manufactured consent — the think tanks, the cable news networks, the compliant legislators, the Ivy League universities — that exists to make the unthinkable seem inevitable. CNN reports that the timing of the attacks is symbolically meaningful in Judaism, carried out ahead of the upcoming Jewish holiday of Purim. The symbolism is not subtle.
But outside this coalition, the world sees clearly. The Global South sees clearly. The billions who live under the shadow of Western power — in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, in the Arab world — they see what is being done. They remember what was done. They understand that the language of freedom is the language of theft when it comes from the mouth of the thief. And increasingly, the citizens of the West itself see it too. Seventy percent of Americans did not want this war. They got it anyway. Democracy, like international law, is a suggestion the empire follows only when it is convenient.
The question is not whether the mask has fallen. The mask has fallen. The question is what comes next — whether the peoples of the world, including those within the imperial core who still possess a conscience, will have the courage to name what they see. It is fascism. It is not “flirting with fascism”. It is not “heading toward fascism.” It is not a deviation from Western civilization. It is its oldest, most persistent expression. The Enlightenment was the parenthesis. The violence is the text. Fascism is the soul.
The missiles fall on Tehran, and the empire asks us to call it freedom.
We must refuse.
– Karim
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