Colonial Psychology, Imperial Violence, and the Path Forward
A Pathology With a Clinical History
The events unfolding in Western Asia in 2025 and 2026 have generated extensive legal and geopolitical commentary. What they have generated less of is psychological analysis, an examination not merely of what is being done, but of the cognitive and moral architecture that makes it possible for those doing it to believe, or perform the belief, that they are civilised actors.
Frantz Fanon, writing from his clinical experience as a psychiatrist treating both colonisers and colonised in Algeria, identified a mechanism central to colonial psychology: projection.
Albert Memmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, described the complementary mechanism: the coloniser's need to dehumanise. Exploitation on the scale that colonialism requires cannot be sustained by a person who fully perceives the humanity of those being exploited. The colonial subject must be rendered, in the coloniser's imagination, as something less, less rational, less capable of self-governance, less deserving of the resources they happen to possess. The dehumanisation is not incidental to the project. It is load-bearing.
These mechanisms are not historical curiosities. They are operational in 2026. When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declares that sovereign nations of the Western Hemisphere are components of an American security perimeter rather than members of a community of equals, he is performing Memmi's dehumanisation in geopolitical register. When President Trump describes Iran as having been "blasted back to the Stone Ages" and frames the assassination of its Supreme Leader as an operational achievement, he is enacting Fanon's projection: attributing to Iran the barbarism that the act itself embodies. When Secretary of State Rubio describes Iran's weakened military position as an opportunity, he is articulating the colonial appetite in its purest form, the injured are available; the hunt should proceed.
The Epstein Doctrine
There is a contemporary frame that names the pathology at its most unguarded. The political class now broadly described, across the Global South and increasingly in Western discourse, as the Epstein class, the network of power that treats the vulnerable as objects of use, that derives pleasure and profit from access to those who cannot refuse, is not a deviation from the colonial tradition. It is its distilled form. The colonial enterprise has always been, at its psychological core, the exercise of power over those who cannot resist it, rationalised as benefit conferred rather than harm inflicted.
What Jeffrey Epstein's network made visible, the entitlement of the powerful to use the bodies and lives of the weak, the institutional protection of that entitlement, the performed ignorance of those who benefited from proximity to it, is precisely what colonialism has always done at civilisational scale. The difference is one of visibility and acknowledgement, not of structure. The child on the island and the nation bombed back to the Stone Ages occupy the same position in the same moral logic: they are weak, therefore they are available.
This is not hyperbole. It is the precise description of what Trump announced on April 1, 2026, when he described Venezuela's oil and gas as now being accessed in American "partnership" following a military operation. The resources of the weak belong, in this logic, to the strong, not by law, but by the fact of strength itself. The law, in this worldview, is what the strong write for the weak. This is what the author's companion article terms lex ex voluntate principis, law from the will of the prince, as opposed to lex inter pares, law between equals.
Erich Fromm, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, described what he called the necrophilous character: the orientation toward control, domination, and the reduction of living complexity to manageable, exploitable objects. The language of the current American administration, "maximum lethality, not tepid legality," "blasted back to the Stone Ages," "decapitation strikes", is the language Fromm identified: the aestheticisation of destruction, the love of force for its own sake, dressed in the vocabulary of necessity and civilisation.
Civilisational Maturity as Strategic Posture
Fanon, in the final pages of The Wretched of the Earth, issued a warning that is rarely quoted alongside his analysis of colonial violence: the colonised must resist the temptation to become the mirror image of the oppressor. Liberation that reproduces the logic of domination is not liberation. The path through is not revenge. It is the construction of a different way of being in the world, one grounded in the humanity that colonialism attempted to deny.
Iran's conduct over the past decade is, whatever one's view of its government, a case study in exactly this posture. It signed the NPT. It accepted the JCPOA's extraordinary inspection regime, constraints that went well beyond its legal obligations, as a gesture of accommodation toward the anxieties of more powerful states. It absorbed the unilateral American withdrawal from that agreement in 2018, the reimposition of sanctions, and the assassination of its senior military commander on foreign soil, without abandoning the legal framework within which it had chosen to operate. It exercised strategic restraint during the Gaza genocide, despite enormous domestic pressure to intervene directly. When it struck, it did so in declared retaliation for direct attacks on its territory, the precise condition under which Article 51 of the UN Charter recognises the right of self-defence.
This is not passivity. It is what Fanon called for: the refusal to allow the aggressor to define the terms of engagement. Iran's strategic patience rests on a sober political-psychological assessment, that a power which projects its own violence onto its victims, which dehumanises in order to exploit, which mistakes the performance of strength for its substance, will eventually consume the legitimacy on which its authority depends. The coloniser's pathology is self-defeating. It always has been.
The Solution Already Underway
The solution to the crisis described in this article is not primarily military or diplomatic, though it involves both. It is civilisational and institutional. The colonised are not merely waiting for the coloniser's pathology to exhaust itself, they are actively constructing the architecture that makes that exhaustion irreversible. The BRICS framework, now encompassing the majority of the world's population and a growing share of its economic output, is building financial and trade infrastructure that does not depend on dollar supremacy or Western institutional approval. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has expanded to include Iran, India, Pakistan, and Belarus among its full members, a security and political framework that operates entirely outside NATO's logic. The growing assertiveness of the Global South in UN bodies, the quiet refusal of dozens of nations to join Western sanctions regimes, China's technological self-sufficiency, Iran's continued investment in scientific and industrial capacity, these are not isolated acts of resistance. They are the coordinated, incremental construction of a world in which the hegemon's rules are one option among many, not the only available framework. This is the structural answer to the colonial pathology: not its mirror image, but its replacement.
Memmi observed that the colonial relationship damages both parties: the colonised through exploitation and dehumanisation, the coloniser through the moral corruption that sustained self-deception requires. The multipolar architecture now taking shape is the material proof of that observation. Every nation that settles trade in a currency other than the dollar, every security agreement concluded outside Washington's framework, every scientific and industrial capability built beyond the reach of sanctions, each is a withdrawal of consent from the colonial arrangement. The ending of that arrangement is not guaranteed and it is not swift. But the record of 2025 and 2026, the alienation of European allies, the fracturing of Western institutional consensus, the growing global audience for Pezeshkian's letter and the shrinking audience for Trump's address, suggests it is structurally underway. The colonised are not waiting to be liberated. They are building the conditions of their own sovereignty, one institution at a time.
A power that spends its legitimacy faster than it can replace it is not demonstrating strength. The colonised, patient and watching, know this. They have always known it. The question is only how much is destroyed before the knowing becomes universal.
A full legal and geopolitical analysis of the American statements examined here, including Hegseth's SOUTHCOM address, Rubio's Good Morning America interview, and Trump's April 1 national address, appears in the companion article: The Prince's Rules: North America, Western Asia, and the Unmaking of International Law, available at bushgrad.blogspot.com.
References
Note: References are not included in the word count submitted to New Eastern Outlook.
Primary Theoretical Sources
Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Paris: Maspero. English translation: Grove Press, 1963. — Foundational analysis of colonial psychology, projection, and the violence of decolonisation.
Fanon, F. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Paris: Seuil. English translation: Grove Press, 1967. — Clinical analysis of the psychological damage inflicted by colonialism on both coloniser and colonised.
Memmi, A. (1957). The Colonizer and the Colonized. Paris: Buchet/Chastel. English translation: Beacon Press, 1965. — Portrait of the colonial relationship as a system of mutual psychological deformation.
Fromm, E. (1973). The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. — Analysis of necrophilous character structure and the psychology of domination.
Supporting Sources
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press. — The normalisation of violence through bureaucratic and ideological systems.
Chomsky, N. (2003). Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. Metropolitan Books.
Parsi, T. (2017). Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Yale University Press.
Legal Instruments Referenced
Charter of the United Nations, 1945. Articles 2(1), 2(4), 2(7), 51.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), 1968. Article IV.
https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/text
Companion Article
Clothier, Y. (Bushgrad). (3 April 2026). The Prince's Rules: North America, Western Asia, and the Unmaking of International Law. Bushgrad.
https://bushgrad.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-princes-rules-north-america-western.html
