In earlier times, colonial powers sent agents to distant shores to locate wealth, used military force to secure trade routes, massacred local populations, and seized their resources—brutal but straightforward. Over time colonialism evolved into a more sophisticated and less costly form of exploitation: nations were coerced through the threat of violence while colonial ‘armadas’ lingered offshore—a reminder of how Great Britain drained the resources of China and India, then among the richest countries. Colonialism gradually gave way to imperialism, maintaining systemic dependence rather than relying on overt conquest.
With the rise of national self-determination and the drive for independence, nowadays, the grip of domination is loosening; “slaves are slipping away from Western white masters”. Those once subjugated are increasingly resisting, turning traditional forms of plunder far more difficult to sustain. What, then, is the alternative for an insatiable dominating power? Analyses of post–World War II geopolitics often point to a recurring pattern: impose crippling sanctions, plunge nations’ economies, foment dissent, form and fund local militias and arm them heavily, stir civil unrest, and push countries into instability. Let us consider a few recent events.
In February 2026, a few days prior to the Israeli–U.S. illegal war on Iran, Steve Witkoff stated that President Trump was “curious”—rather than explicitly frustrated—as to why Iran had not “capitulated” despite a major U.S. naval buildup. The war was then imposed on Iran as the latest phase of a broader campaign started years ago with maximum-pressure sanctions. The earlier phase occurred when a 10-day peaceful protest over economic difficulties turned into violent civil unrest, during which Israeli and U.S. officials including Donald Trump reportedly acknowledged infiltrating agents and distributing weapons within the population; There is ample evidence, including numerous witness reports and audio recordings, describing organized groups within the protesters operating in “black bloc”–style formations—a tactic common in the Western context. Random bystanders and protesters were gunned down by armed insurgents or caught in crossfire with the police; the goal was to increase the death toll, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of police officers and many innocent civilians. The death toll was drastically exaggerated on the same night as the events, raising questions about how international organizations counted the deaths and how much of the Western media propagated the figures. This is a known tactic, particularly in the Israeli playbook: a false flag operation that we witnessed a few years ago in Syria. It was intended to desensitize the Iranian public and “manufacture consent” for a full-scale war on Iran—while Iranian officials published their own figures with complete details, still a staggering number of over 3,000.
Over the past two and a half years of the latest Israeli genocide of Palestinians, the world has become increasingly aware of the nature of the occupying apartheid state—the West’s military garrison, an artificial construct given birth by Balfour declaration and Sykes-Picot Agreement, when colonial powers laid claim to the land that didn’t belong to them, enforcing domination over the region. The world’s perception of the American empire is also changing, albeit at a much slower pace. The delusion of a benevolent U.S., rooted in the Greco-Roman philosophy, in pursuit of fostering democracy and liberty around the world—is crumbling down at last. Under the banner of ‘America First,’ Donald Trump has transformed the United States as an imperial power overstretched in its efforts to bully and exploit, into a stark embodiment of naked colonialism—one that abandons pretense and openly advocates the seizure of other nations’ resources, as reflected in his rhetoric on Venezuela’s and Iran’s oil.
With the rise of social media and independent journalism, the past two and a half years have exposed the Israeli genocide, fueled by U.S. support in 4k streaming. Yet many remain entangled in a “manufactured illusion” that obscures the underlying nature of American imperial power: as Matt Kennard puts it, the business of exploiting the “wretched of the earth”. Those most deeply immersed in this illusion are perhaps the American public itself. For decades following the Second World War, the mainstream Western media apparatus, alongside Hollywood, has whitewashed U.S. atrocities while shaping and influencing both the American populace and the broader global consciousness, cultivating narratives that enchant and “condition” public perception. Amid the humdrum and often demanding routines of working life in the United States, disentangling one’s thinking from these engineered narratives requires considerable effort.
The mechanisms through which U.S. empire continues to shape perception, and to obscure the broader moral ramifications of its actions, have long been examined by social scientists, activists, and philosophers. Jeffrey Sachs describes the United States as the most savage country after the Second World War, while Noam Chomsky calls it the world’s biggest terrorist, and John Mearsheimer refers to it as the most brutal empire. Yet as the empire continues its atrocities, countering these often multilayered and complex mechanisms demands greater effort, and awareness must reach a wider public. Such critical awareness may ultimately guide our path toward the advancement of human civilization. After all, isn’t that one of the fundamental aims of life?
In the calamity caused by the U.S.–Israeli aggression against Iran, I, like many others, have been following a wide spectrum of Western media channels, which more than ever highlight an imperial, colonial mindset among many analysts. It is astonishing to see that much of the focus remains on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its impact on the global economy. Even those who appear more liberal tend to emphasize the economic burden on the West, with little or no discussion of the moral and ethical justification for the war.
Joe Kent in his interview with Tucker Carlson argued that the war should have been limited in scope and duration, emphasizing that he is no supporter of the Iranian “regime,” having previously fought against it during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, in addition to their belittling and derogatory rhetoric toward Iran such as “lunatic nation”, including expletive-ridden social media posts and even using genocidal language like “a whole civilization will die tonight”, have coupled such discourse with the targeting of Iranian civilian infrastructure, including universities, schools, pharmaceutical facilities, and bridges, actions widely regarded as war crimes. These positions have been justified through similar reasoning as Joe Kent described, including claims that Iran has been responsible for the deaths of their soldiers over decades and for Iran’s proliferation of terrorism in the region.
It has seemingly never occurred to them to ask what they were doing in the region in the first place, nor to Joe Kent to question why Iranians were fighting U.S. forces in Iraq. Such a question leads back to Iraq’s invasion of Iran—an eight-year brutal war that caused roughly one million Iranian casualties—during which the United States supported Saddam Hussein. The West largely turned a blind eye to the use of chemical weapons against Iranians; Germany and other European countries supplied such weapons, the effects of which Iran still endures. When the situation is reversed, why should Iran have refrained from retaliation when U.S. forces were positioned next door, expanding their military presence and perceived threat, with the intention of invading Iran soon after, as described by Wesley Clark as a plan to “take out seven countries in five years”?
The imperial hubris is so entitled that fails to even foresee and consider the inevitability of consequences—as if Iran were expected to remain a “well-behaved victim”. A similar dynamic is described by Richard D. Wolff, who notes how European settlers in America labeled indigenous people as “savages” while violently killing them after taking their land. Beneath the surface, the modern world still reflects the same brutal patterns of domination.
Another colonial aspect of this war is revealed in the fact that the U.S. and Israel rarely acknowledge the extent of damage and casualties they sustain, instead imposing strict censorship on such losses. This reflects a supremacist mindset: an unwillingness to admit being struck by a country in the Global South, a country they have been imposing harshest sanctions and demonizing for decades simply due to its defiance of Western hegemony, particularly since its revolution in 1979. The implication is clear—if such vulnerability were openly recognized, it could weaken colonial ability to maintain dominance and might embolden and inspire others in the Global South that imperial powers seek to keep subordinated.
When Iran nationalized its oil in March 1951, it faced a UK–U.S.-led coup d’état in 1953 that removed the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and toppled perhaps the first democracy in Asia. Mosaddegh’s movement inspired Egyptians to nationalize the Suez Canal; the same pattern is vivid: never allow the dominated Global South to break out of what Aravind Adiga calls the “rooster coop.”
The Western perspective intentionally omits to fact that Iran—one of the world’s oldest civilizations, and perhaps the oldest continuous nation—has a longstanding scientific tradition. Many scientific developments in Europe during the Renaissance drew extensively on earlier Iranian contributions in mathematics, medicine, chemistry, and astronomy. In recent decades, despite brutal sanctions, scientific activity in Iran has expanded significantly, with growth rates among the fastest globally and advances in several fields placing it among leading countries. These advancements have coincided with Israelis assassinating Iranian scientists for years—actions met with deafening silence in the West and never condemned by the United Nations.
The recent destruction of the Iranian bridge—the largest and most complex in Western Asia—by U.S.–Israeli forces was not merely the demolition of infrastructure but a deliberate signal to the Global South: we, the colonial powers determine the level and extent of progress for others, and others must remain dependent on “us” to build what they need. The justification for destroying infrastructure through claims of “dual use”—even when the bridge had not yet been inaugurated—or targeting energy facilities on the grounds that resources might be diverted to military purposes reflects a pattern: “might is right”; the powerful commit war crimes with impunity, while similar actions by the weak are labeled and obsessively highlighted in Western media as “terrorism.”
Colonial powers have long degraded and humiliated the achievements of the Global South to strip the subjugated ones of their agency, suppress their self-esteem, and instill that they are nothing without colonial authority. One need only watch a few episodes of Piers Morgan’s shows on Iran to observe his tone of contempt when belittling Iran’s 2023 response to Israel—a calibrated retaliation for attacks on its embassy, largely neutralized by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Persian Gulf Arab states through interceptors and fighter jets. Despite the involvement of multiple countries in defending Israel, Piers Morgan boasted of Iran’s inability to mount a potent response—an attitude marked by evident arrogance and disdain, failing to consider that Iran may have acted with restraint to avoid a full-blown war while demonstrating its capabilities. Morgan’s show is a masterclass in understanding a colonial mindset. Throughout the genocide in Gaza, his first questions to guests have been “Do you condemn Hamas?” or “Israel has the right to defend itself,” while ignoring the fact that brutal occupation, suppression, apartheid, and mass killing of Israel have caused the emergence of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. By framing the discussion in this way, he pressures guests to conform to a Western narrative of events. A colonial mindset expects the subjugated to be “well-behaved victims”. Morgan and much of the media apparatus apply the same logic when labeling Iran a sponsor of terrorism, questioning why anyone would support such groups while refusing to address the root causes of the emergence of such groups: imperialism, colonialism, subjugation, oppression, and the prevention of development.
Another manifestation of imperial hubris is evident in the way Donald Trump speaks about Iran, repeatedly threatening to destroy its power and oil infrastructure and to control its oil. The rhetoric of threatening Iran has persisted for decades; since at least the Bush administration, the phrase “all options are on the table” has been regurgitated ad nauseam. In recent weeks, the United States and Israel have extensively bombed hundreds of schools, tens of universities and research centers, refineries, hospitals, temples, steel and pharmaceutical factories, water sources, airports, research facilities, and bridges.
However, the United States has a long history of executing such actions: it bombed the majority of civilian infrastructure in North Korea, Syria, Vietnam, Iraq, and Japan; chemical agents were used, including Agent Orange in Vietnam; depleted uranium bombs were deployed in Iraq, Serbia, and Bosnia, resulting in millions of casualties. Not to mention sanctions, a form of economic terrorism that resulted in millions more deaths indirectly, according to The Lancet. Such actions were never explicitly labeled as war crimes, as they were perpetrated by dominant global powers. Meanwhile, these actions have been normalized by the colonial West; this is why the militarized settler-colonial garrison, Israel, continues to carry out similar actions against Palestinians with impunity. The question one should ask is why, growing up, children do not become aware of imperialist and colonial actions of dominant powers, even within those countries, with the aim of preventing their recurrence. Many instead grow up admiring the United States as the “leader of the free world.” The answer lies in complex forms of colonial soft power and methodology—media apparatuses and Hollywood—largely erasing and systematically romanticizing, for instance, U.S. actions as heroic and gallant.
Equally devastating is the silence among European actors, often meticulous in scrutinizing the language of others, yet largely uncritical of Trump’s and Israeli’s rhetoric and actions and their explicit implications for war crimes. Western countries have, in this sense, long forfeited their pretensions to moral superiority. It has become increasingly apparent that the West’s posture of instructing others on ethics and moral values functions as an empty façade, masking underlying pursuits of hegemony and exploitation.
Over the past decades, and particularly during the recent illegal war, Western media and activists have been quick to invoke Iran’s human rights record and to demonize the country for its shortcomings, especially regarding women’s rights. From their ivory towers, they insinuate that the West has always been a safe haven for women, neglecting the fact that, to this day, women across much of the Western world continue to push for equal rights. Women in Iran gained the right to vote in 1963—earlier than even some advanced countries, such as Switzerland, and decades before almost all Arab countries in Western Asia—and there has never been a legal ban on women driving, contrary to the image long projected in the West. All of this is purposefully neglected in Western media. This does not mean that women in Iran benefit from the same liberties as their counterparts in the West.
Countries evolve along different historical trajectories. When Iranians were developing modern mathematics, algebra, and algorithms, much of Europe was engaged in internal conflict and rudimentary constant wars. Since 1979, there have, undeniably, been religious impositions on women’s rights—rules such as mandatory hijab that are almost impossible to justify from a modern liberal perspective. While the state should not impose itself on social norms and societies should reach consensus organically, the religious conservatism that culminated in the 1979 revolution was very much caused and shaped by the last Shah of Iran. The Shah’s colonized mentality, and perhaps the internalized fear resulting from witnessing his powerful father—the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty—sent into exile by the British army despite neutrality in the world war, were grounded in the belief that he needs to appease the West to keep the throne and pursue what many believe he envisioned for Iran: a powerful, independent country. Shah was under the impression that a nation to develop must appear Western in form and substance—led him to marginalize religious segments of society. In doing so, he and his close advisors/intellectuals systematically downplayed Iran’s achievements following the advent of Islam, a period that remains profoundly significant. Indeed, without Iran, what is now described as Islamic science, art and architecture all around the Islamic world, would be fundamentally diminished, as they rest heavily on Iranian contributions. Nonetheless, these achievements form part of Iranian history after the advent of Islam, and there is no reason to erase them from public consciousness. That interference of the state in suppressing Islamic heritage and attempting to take Iran back to a pre-Islamic image incited conservative religious layers of society. This was exacerbated by U.S. advice to the Shah that, in cracking down on dissident political activists, he should leave Islamist groups unharmed: Communism was deemed the main threat in the bipolar world (during the cold war), with an Islamic/religious narratives as its antidote. Bear in mind that the U.S. has long been obsessed with imposing capitalism and its own way of life on the world: a system of free trade in which it exploits the resources of poorer countries and sells high–value-added products, itself another manifestation of colonialism.
However, Western media deliberately obscures the fact that after 1979, under the newly formed conservative state, many religious families who might otherwise have pushed their daughters into early marriage were instead persuaded to send them en masse to the many universities established by the revolutionary government. They permitted their daughters to live away from home in rather strictly regulated dormitories. The essence of the university—an intellectual environment that promotes debate and questioning—led to drastic progress not only in education levels, but also in women’s awareness of their rights, their demand for accountability, and a major cultural paradigm shift within what is now a highly educated society.
Today, Iran has one of the highest rates of university graduates globally, with Iranian women comprising 55–65 percent of university students and accounting for 35–50 percent of STEM graduates—figures higher than those in the United States, Germany, and France. They are among the most highly educated female populations globally, particularly in terms of university enrollment and participation in STEM—traditionally male-dominated fields. Many now lead major tech startups, hospitals, and petrochemical and other industrial companies.
To better understand what the West so profusely labels as the ‘Iranian regime,’ often simplified as an authoritarian system that suppresses women’s rights, it is necessary to examine the 1979 revolution—a popular uprising whose central aim was to establish Iran as an independent state and to prevent Western powers, particularly the United States, from exploiting its resources. Although one may argue that the last Shah of Iran held similar intentions in the later years of his reign, he lacked the necessary instruments to fully execute them, and even the expression of a desire for independence placed him at odds with the West. Despite being an ally, the United States restricted the Shah’s access to industrial sectors—such as iron smelting—while promoting arms sales, effectively maintaining dependency, in a manner strikingly similar to the present dynamics in Arab Gulf states, where snake oil is sold as protection, with little to no real avail.
The 1979 revolution was, in many respects, an amalgamation of longstanding Iranian aspirations for freedom and the separation of power, first articulated during the secular Constitutional Revolution of 1906. That project was weakened and ultimately undermined by the 1953 U.S.–UK coup, reinforcing a national drive for independence and the removal of foreign intervention. Over the intervening decades, Iranians endured repeated humiliation during both world wars: despite maintaining neutrality, Iran was occupied; the Anglo-Soviet invasion disrupted food supplies to sustain occupying forces and contributed to famine conditions that claimed the lives of millions within a population of roughly 10–12 million; an action that could reasonably be considered a genocide, as a large proportion of Iranians died.
These chapters of history are largely and deliberately suppressed in Western media, portraying Iran as a hostile state opposed to Western democracy and lifestyle, bent on its destruction. As Netanyahu repeatedly asserts, Israel is fighting “barbarian savages”—a characterization he extends to Iran—on behalf of the Western world.
The newly formed revolutionary officials, akin to many revolutionaries, lacked administrative experience and refinement in their language. Through mottos such as “exporting the revolution”, they sought to inspire the people of the region to break the shackles of imperialism; by “death to America”, as they repeatedly explained, they meant opposition to American policies and hegemony, not the people of the United States. Their lack of familiarity with the Western-dominated post–World War II order, and the absence of political nuance, paved the way for the United States and the West as a whole to impose sanctions and sustain a prolonged campaign of demonization. Yet beneath all these justifications lay a more fundamental issue: the emergence of a country determined to resist imperialism and to remain independent.
It is imperative to highlight that on multiple occasions, the Iranian state has sought to integrate with the Western order in the past three decades. The reformist project of President Khatami—most notably his “Dialogue of Civilizations” initiative—alongside Iran’s cooperation with the United States in the defeat of the Taliban, was met with Washington labeling Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil”. The Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) under Obama represented another such attempt; it can be seen as a Deng Xiaoping–like moment, signaling a willingness to shift toward engagement with the West—an effort ultimately undone by Trump. During these periods, Iranian civil society gained greater space to develop, only to face renewed pressure each time those openings collapsed and hardliners reasserted control—particularly as Israel, seeking to maintain regional dominance and unwilling to tolerate the emergence of a strong independent state, succeeded in pushing the United States toward a harsher stance on Iran.
Severe sanctions resulting in economic hardship and certainly corruption, rapid cultural shifts among younger generations, the state’s limited adaptability to a wide spectrum of societal demands and changes, and other factors have left many Iranians angry and dissident. While significant transformation is sought, these tensions reflect a society in transition rather than stagnation: a nation negotiating its own version of modernity through contests and clashes among diverse and competing forces. Concurrently, the presence of an ideologically constrained state media that does not represent the full social spectrum has enabled external narratives to occupy much of the discursive space. These narratives—primarily disseminated through Persian-language opposition outlets based in Western colonial centers and Tel Aviv—have substantially shaped a significant portion of public discourse.
These outlets reproduce the same colonial logic described by Albert Memmi, in which the colonized subject internalizes blame. This pattern appears across many tyrant–victim relationships. In a still patriarchal world, for example, many women refrain from reporting rape because elements within society place the blame on them rather than on the perpetrators. “Internalizing blame” also functions as a recruitment policy of imperial and colonial powers, attracting top talent to leave their own countries—often destroyed and destabilized by those same powers—to work for the “free world”. A similar narrative appears among some Iranian dissidents, arguing that Iran itself is responsible for instability in the region and West is nothing but glory, democracy and freedom. Even when agree with the nature of colonial powers, they urge compromise and caution against challenging dominant forces in order to preserve peace; some of their arguments include “those who have power have the right to exploit simply because they can”. A clear double standard arises: when dissatisfied with their own government, resistance is justified, yet when faced with external power, submission is the rational path.
In more recent agendas, such as those attributed to Mossad, colonial funded Persian language media channels, capitalize on societal fault lines, including religion and ethnicity, to capitalize on fractions, similar to what U.S. did in former Yugoslavia, again not knowing the fact that various ethnicities and religions in Iran have been living together in peace for millennia. They advance the notion that integration with the world requires assimilation into Western culture, even “becoming white”, positioning the “West” as the world itself and diminishing the significance of the East. This mentality is evident among segments of Iranians who display a “white wannabe” outlook, speaking derogatorily about Eastern countries and dismissing economic partnerships with the East—narratives amplified through numerous Western-backed media channels. It is striking that China, a country with millennia of relations with Iran, remains poorly understood among many Iranians, whose perceptions align closely with Western, particularly U.S., portrayals. This tendency is especially pronounced among segments of the Iranian diaspora that seek salvation in comprehensive Westernization while neglecting the historical and ongoing realities of colonial domination, including U.S. exploitation and intervention in the region.
The Iranian state has many drawbacks, largely rooted in cultural challenges and institutional inefficiencies along its path of social and political development; these are matters for Iranians themselves to refine, revise, or even overturn. It nonetheless constitutes a nation-state. The current war, if anything, underscores this reality: a system that, despite the assassination of many of its leaders, continues to stand firm, defend its people, and carry out its functions.
For a state to maintain sovereignty and ensure survival, it must recognize that reliance on international institutions such as the UN—structured primarily around Western geopolitical interests—or appeals to global sympathy is insufficient. Self-defense capacity is essential to counter colonialism and exploitation by the U.S. and its allies. Numerous cases illustrate this, including the genocide of Gazans and military actions against Iran, where incidents such as the killing of schoolchildren are framed as “collateral damage,” and the destruction of critical infrastructure—constituting war crimes—fails to elicit meaningful condemnation from Western political actors.
While we remain both anxious and hopeful about Iran’s future and the aftermath of the ongoing war, one point is more vivid than ever: the struggle for independence from brutal imperial powers—what is often called “resistance” in the Global South—will continue. It is difficult, and many have been so far tempted to give up in Iran soon after 1979 revolution, as it is not confined to the battlefield; it unfolds across multiple strata—from subtle influences on children in schools, to the economy, to complex media propaganda—shaping every aspect around which the colonized and the colonizer revolve.
Iran, perhaps as the backbone of the so called “axis of resistance”, will face significant challenges even after the war. In the event of achieving its goals, Iran may have taken major steps toward decolonizing Western Asia, but its internal challenges will remain. These include addressing the aftermath of decades of harsh sanctions, adapting to cultural shifts among younger generations and opening the political sphere to greater inclusivity and enabling more systematic political party development. Iran should confront the psychological pathology resulting from years of colonial media narratives that have fostered self-denigration and shaped segments of society in the absence of wise and inclusive state media. Iran faces a major challenge in decolonizing segments of its own society.
