Beyond the lesser evil

Some questions linger less as problems to be solved than as moods that refuse to lift. They return in moments of watching, listening, and trying to make sense of a world that insists on repeating itself under new names. One such question concerns the proximity between foreign intervention and domestic repression, and the ease with which the two seem to flow into one another.

In many places grouped under the loose heading of the “Third World,” resistance to global imperialism, the afterlife of colonial domination led by the West, is spoken of as a moral necessity. Yet this same language often accompanies the shrinking of public life, the hardening of authority, and the quiet normalization of harm inflicted on one’s own people. It becomes difficult not to ask whether opposition to Western power has come to demand an inward turn toward coercion.

Must a Muslim, African, or Arab society, in seeking to stand against Europe and the United States, first endure forms of violence and dispossession that echo, and sometimes exceed, the injuries of colonial rule?

Take armed extremist groups as an example. They insist that they are responding to massacres orchestrated from Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels against their brothers in Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and as far as the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. At first glance, these claims are not fabricated out of thin air. What unfolded from Kabul to Abu Ghraib, from the cages of Guantánamo to the plains of Mali and the heart of Mogadishu, were naked invasions and deliberate atrocities. But does resisting these crimes truly require slaughtering the very people you claim to defend?

Today, we are witnessing a televised genocide, live-streamed and collectively consumed, against Palestinians; chaos and brute violence unleashed in Sudan; the systematic wreckage of Libya; France’s campaigns in Mali and Burkina Faso; and the routine brutalities carried out by foreign powers across the Global South. We watched the United States bulldoze every legal and moral constraint the world once pretended to respect, storming its way into the palace of Venezuela’s president. Israel bombarded Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and even Iran almost simultaneously. In Somalia, foreign troops are repeatedly accused of killing, looting, raping civilians, whether African forces, American airstrikes, or Turkish involvement. All of this has unfolded in a remarkably short span of time.

In such a moment, it is easy to conclude that imperialism has grown arrogant and unrestrained, that it needs to be humbled, and that anyone who says “no” deserves applause. The so-called Axis of Resistance led by Iran often appears, to many, as a compelling embodiment of that refusal.

American and European sanctions imposed on disfavored regions of the world demonstrably devastate the poor and the vulnerable. A major study published last year in The Lancet found that more than half a million people die every year from causes directly linked to Western sanctions and economic strangulation. This figure nearly matches the annual death toll of armed conflict itself. So when non-Western governments complain about embargoes and “economic warfare,” they are not merely crying into the void. The harm is real. The question is: to whose benefit?

Movements and states that posture as opponents of neo-colonialism often bombard us with slogans and rhetorical weeds that, taken at face value, might suggest dignity and justice. But when we condemn the kidnapping of Maduro, does that absolve the abuses he inflicted on his own people? When we insist that Iran is being unjustly targeted and demand an end to aggression against it, are we therefore required to fall silent about the devastation the Ayatollahs has imposed on Persian society since 1979? When we acknowledge that the Houthis, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, the remnants of ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, and similar non-state actors draw on real examples of Western violence to legitimize their “jihad” against global imperialism, does that oblige us to support them, knowing full well that they pursue their political aims through any means available, cloaked in religious language?

A dictatorship that has crushed its people generation after generation may suddenly board the train of anti-imperialism and global liberation. How, then, do we tell the difference?

On the other side, when we oppose or openly resist the decaying regimes in our own countries, does that mean we are quietly aligning ourselves with Western imperialism? Are we expected to become like the heir of the Shah in Iran, or the Venezuelan opposition figure recently awarded the Nobel Prize, both of whom often behave as though their countries are expendable bargaining chips to be traded for American approval?

The writer and social thinker Saker El Nour recently published an essay that pushed my thinking further. He writes: “To understand this entangled condition, we must return to a structurally simple but politically decisive question: why do we oppose imperialism in the first place? We oppose it because it is built on coercion and extraction, on siphoning surplus value, degrading collective capacity, and sabotaging paths to genuine development.” If this is the core of our critique, Saker continues, then we must turn the same question toward regimes that wave the banner of anti-imperialism: do they not themselves govern through coercion and extraction? Is their legitimacy not founded on force and suppression, devoid of real representation and public participation?

Ultimately, we are cornered between two equally corrosive options: using dictators and extremists to fight neo-colonialism, or using imperial power to discipline domestic tyranny and fanaticism. Paul D’Amato, the author of The Meaning of Marxism (2006), reflects on nationalist movements and governments that rally populations around anti-colonial rhetoric. When the national bourgeoisie urges you to close ranks, to temporarily ignore “internal disagreements” because the time has come to unite as “one fist” against the “external enemy,” D’Amato explains, echoing Frantz Fanon, what is really being secured is not liberation but the longevity of their rule. Their interest is survival, not justice.

Likewise, those who rise up against domestic tyranny are not necessarily courting foreign domination. The people protesting today against Iran’s clerical regime are not asking for American rule, nor are they yearning for the brutal monarchy of the Shah to return.

When the dust settles, the true struggle for dignity lies in refusing to choose between two poisons. Fleeing one catastrophe should not require swallowing another of equal toxicity. Rejecting the killing of civilians by American or Turkish drones does not mean we must line up in the camps of religious annihilation in places like Jilib. The distance between these positions is vast. Strengthening accountability and the rule of law, rooting politics in participation rather than fear, and centering the sanctity of human life are not luxuries. They are the only capital without which no genuine emancipation is possible.