A long, vibrant mural of intricate illustrations, small Palestinian flags, and a mother cradling a child. Tehran, Iran. June 14, 2025. (Fatima Joumaa/The Public Source)
From Colonial Psychiatry to Pop Psychology: The Psychological War on Anti-Imperialism
On the first day of the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, I came across a cartoon circulating through the Instagram stories of my diasporic Iranian family and friends. It narrated the outbreak of war through a simple exchange: one character asks, “What happened?” Another replies: “The bad guys attacked the bad guys with the help of the bad guys.” In the homeland, many understood the war as a unilateral act of aggression initiated by the U.S. and Israel. In the belly of the beast, the language of “bad guys versus bad guys” quickly reframed it as a clash between equal powers.
This cartoonish analysis erases the United States’ position as the leader of the imperialist world order, a global system of extraction and destruction that sanctions and bombs countries across the Global South to impose economic dependency and political subservience.
Iran has been confronting yet another U.S.-Zionist war since February 28. By Iran, I mean both the state and the people — as in reports that the Islamic Republic downed an "untouchable" F-35 for the first time in history, and in a U.S. general’s description of how “every single person in Iran who had a small arms weapon” was firing at American aircrafts. Yet in countries aligned with the U.S.-led imperialist order, expressions of support for that resistance are frequently denounced as extremism. This denunciation produces confusion and fear, occupying the space where anti-imperialist solidarity might otherwise emerge.
Moving from the scene of resistance in Iran to the scene of its denunciation in the West requires shifting attention from the war front to the narratives surrounding it. To understand the relative absence of anti-imperialist solidarity with Iran and its resistance to attacks on its sovereignty, we must pay attention to the cold psychological war on the very idea of anti-imperialism.
The knee-jerk demand for more “complexity” is, ironically, a call to adopt the cartoon’s logic and rehearse a double condemnation of the “bad guys.” As the scholar Setareh Shohadaei argues, this form of liberal both-sidesism establishes a false equivalence between imperial aggressors and the sovereign nation under attack, distributing equal, if not greater, blame for the war on the state defending itself.
Deviation from this both-sides script invites reprimand in two mutually reinforcing forms. The first, which has been discussed more extensively elsewhere, is the call to extend international solidarity to “people,” not “states.” Despite rebuking anti-imperialists for supposedly seeing the world through the reductive binary of “good states versus bad states,” this formulation imposes its own ethical binary between “good people” and “bad states.” Philosopher Omid Mehrgan argues that this discursive dichotomy between the people and the state reinforces the official rhetoric that rendered Iran bombardable in the first place by representing military strikes on Iran as targeting “the regime” rather than “the people.”
This frame of analysis also misrepresents the structural position of peoples and states in the Global South. As researcher and writer Max Ajl argues, the state is both a site of internal conflict and struggle among non-homogenous peoples and a condition for social reproduction. This dual role is reflected in the state's military capacity to shield society from the imperialist fantasy of total social destruction, even as it provides the infrastructure needed to meet social needs.
The Demand for Ambiguity
Still, supporters of Iran’s national resistance to the U.S.-Zionist aggression — and those who praise Iran’s support for Lebanese and Palestinian resistance — continue to be smeared as extremists who cannot grasp the complexities of our “bad-guys-versus-bad-guys” world. In “anti-war” organizing spaces, “leftist” media and across social media platforms, they are further rebuked through a second, less scrutinized form of reprimand, exemplified in the recitation of the phrase, “Two things can be true at once.”
Political commentators point out that this phrase replaces analysis with “vibes” and is an effect of “Instagram politics.” More precisely, we can recognize this second form of reproach as psychological: “two opposite things can be true at once” is a mantra used in strands of behavioral therapy to “manage intense emotions.” Reliance on this phrase speaks to the implicit diagnosis of anti-imperialists as extremists who must learn therapeutic techniques such as “both/and thinking.”
In the effort to delegitimize support for anti-colonial and anti-imperial resistance — whether in Palestine, Lebanon, or Iran — domestic counter-terrorism infrastructures in the imperial core have expanded their powers of surveillance, incarceration and, more elusively, psychological warfare. Counter-extremism provides the framework through which the latter is articulated.
The premise of counter-extremism is that “black-and-white thinking” foreshadows “extremist violence.” This potential, experts argue, can be thwarted by developing the capacity for “complex” thinking in “vulnerable” individuals. This approach is embedded in international organizations through initiatives such as the United Nations’ Preventing Violent Extremism Through Education; in national counter-terrorism policies such as the U.K.’s Prevent program; and in Global North development and aid funding in the Global South, increasingly tied to security agendas. Among the latter, notably, is USAID funding for youth education and employment support programs from Morocco to Somalia, each with embedded counter-extremism goals.
The Prevent program — a branch of the U.K.’s counter-terrorism and security strategy — is often treated as an international model for other national counter-extremism policies, including those in Canada, France, Denmark and Australia. It offers an illuminating example. The program legally obligates healthcare and education workers in the U.K. to report any patient or student they suspect might be “vulnerable” to extremism. According to policy documents, signs of vulnerability include “an aspiration to defend Muslims when they appear to be under attack.” They further cite “a sense that Muslim communities are being unfairly treated” arising from “so-called ‘stop and search’ powers used by the police” and “UK foreign policy, notably with regard to Muslim countries” (emphasis added). Through this reasoning, British participation in imperialist wars that have cost millions of lives over the past two decades alone, along with racist policing at home, is reduced to a problem of perception. Material conditions that can only be addressed through political action are transformed into matters of “sense” and “so-called” grievances to be managed in the mind.
Those marked as “vulnerable” to such “black-and-white” perception are often those made diasporic by imperialist interventions, military and economic alike. Responsibility for global violence shifts from those who maintain and benefit from a starkly unequal world to those who recognize it as such and are deemed “at risk” for demanding otherwise.
The Psychology of Empire
Alongside the spread of counter-extremism programs within formal institutions, a steady stream of pop-psychology titles has rendered this framework mainstream as a way of understanding political problems. In a recent trade book, “The Ideological Brain,” Leor Zmigrod, an expert in political neuroscience, warns readers that if we fail to examine our own “ideological” thinking, as various extremisms threaten “our open and tolerant societies,” then “we are at risk of dehumanizing ourselves.” At its core then, counter-extremism diagnoses the greatest threat to humanity as the inability of some humans to think like humans.
In recent years, the ethic of counter-extremism has also shaped political education content on social media. While the Zionist entity has accelerated its genocide in Gaza under the banner of fighting “human animals” and has expanded its warfare toward the realization of a “Greater Israel,” this same ethic repeatedly appears in content warning against “romanticizing” regional resistance to the Zionist project. Instead of supporting actually-existing anti-imperialism, those witnessing the catastrophe are advised to resist “binary thinking” in the interest of staying human.
The popularized notion of extremism as a mode of thinking that is insufficiently human is grounded in Western understandings of “the human.” Historically, the West has constructed its knowledge of the human through opposition to the “less than fully human” and “the non-human” — racialized representations ascribed to populations subjected by the white Man to enslavement, genocide, colonialism, and imperialism.
Counter-extremism borrows this knowledge from its predecessor, 20th-century ethnopsychiatry, which ideologically laundered the suppression of anti-colonial movements. The British suppression of the Kikuyu Uprising — where an estimated 90,000 Kenyans were killed, including through starvation in concentration camps — was ideologically supported by a 1954 government-commissioned report titled “The Psychology of the Mau Mau.” In his report, the ethnopsychiatrist J.C. Carothers describes “the African” as having a tendency to think in extremes and to “oscillate between the conviction that events are wholly good and the conviction that events are wholly evil,” as well as having an emotional tendency toward a state of mind characterized by “the highest degree of unconstraint.”
A street demonstration on the anniversary of the 1962 Algerian War for Independence. The large banner reads: “ALGERIA WILL LIVE INDEPENDENTLY.” October 30, 1974.
In the context of the Algerian Revolution, Frantz Fanon famously critiqued French psychiatrists associated with the Algiers School of Psychiatry for similarly describing the Algerian as someone who “likes extremes” and is “insensible to shades of meaning.”
Counter-extremism today re-invents ethnopsychiatry to exhaust resistance to imperialism. Its measures — metrics of “psychological capacity” and tactics of psychological diagnosis and intervention — pathologize anti-imperialism as the extremism of West Asia’s “human animals,” while lulling analysis to sleep through a rhythm of constant negation: “two things can be true at once.” In this way, counter-extremism offers therapeutic techniques for distress tolerance as a substitute for both a clear understanding of the world we live in and potential organizing efforts to change it.
This way, war crimes pile up, and the narrative frame still holds. It holds as aggressors proceed from killing schoolchildren to demolishing universities, factories, and pharmaceutical manufacturers in a country that produces 90 percent of its own medicine, due to U.S.-led sanctions. The frame’s edges remain unsmudged by ecocidal attacks on fuel depots, even as residents say, “Our lungs were burning just from breathing inside our own living room.” To borrow from June Jordan’s poetry — written in response to the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and in refusal of the dehumanizing narratives that justified the violence — it seems that today, too, “there is less and less living room.” Still, witnesses are counseled to embrace ambiguity.
Psychic Militancy
Since the latest war on Iran began, I have been rereading Simin Daneshvar’s 1969 novel “Savushun.” The novel is set in Shiraz during the Allied occupation of Iran (1941–46), which triggered a catastrophic famine in 1942. In one early scene, the imposing rhythm of occupation, the steady beat of its presence in almost every corner of everyday life, is interrupted by Yousef, the husband of the protagonist, Zari. Yousef makes barbed comments about the occupation to a British general. The general responds, in his stilted Farsi, “God has given you so much resources in this country. Give some to us. It belongs to everyone, to all mankind. It is too much just for you.” To which Yousef responds, with a bitter laugh, “You sound like BP.”
Simin Daneshvar, Iranian author of the novel “Savushun” (1969). (Unknown Photographer/Creative Commons)
It has been more than 70 years since Iran was first sanctioned for daring to end the colonial extraction of its resources by nationalizing its oil, against British interests — a logic of imperial punishment that has since reinvented itself under new guises, from the 1979 revolution to the nuclear file. Then, too, Iran’s efforts at political independence and sovereign development were presented by the British government at the U.N. Security Council as “a threat to international peace and security.”
Today, BP operates and is the largest shareholder of the BTC pipeline, through which the entity receives 40 percent of its crude oil to fuel the genocide in Gaza and its escalating wars in the region. The profiteering powers that hope to crush sovereignty in the region continue to asphyxiate all life that stands in their way, again in the name of peace and security for “mankind.” And those who benefit from today’s imperialist world order continue to demand psychic surrender from those who reject its violence and the frame that sustains it.
To adapt the old adage, it is easier to continue watching the end of the world than to imagine the end of U.S.-led imperialism. The psychological war on anti-imperialism ideologically paves the way for the normalization of U.S.-led imperialism, the genocidal Zionist settler-colonial project, and their shared regional aims of de-development and resource extraction. Yet those of us who dream not of tolerating the repeating catastrophes but of ending the repetitions are responsible, as Fanon says, for “not imposing upon the brain rhythms which very quickly obliterate it.”
Frantz Fanon and his medical team pose for a photo outside the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, where he worked from 1953 to 1956. Blida, Algeria. (Unknown Photographer/Creative Commons)
Refusing surrender demands what psychoanalytic psychologist Lara Sheehi theorizes as psychic militancy, which requires that we recognize psychological weapons for what they are, every time. We might take up Yousef’s bitter laugh, for the fight for liberation from imperialists depends on refusing their measures of humanity and conceptions of thinking and being well. While liberal society calls on anti-imperialists to prove their status as ‘human’ by de-exceptionalizing US-led imperialism — and showing greater capacity for “nuance” — imperialism pursues its singularly violent and expansive assault on the very possibility of a dignified life.
On that night when Trump promised Iranians that a “whole civilization will die” — and justified the threat by insisting that “they are animals” — I renewed my resolve to keep refusing their measures. As a Zionist television channel aired a live countdown to this next promised annihilation, I promised myself to keep counting on a different rhythm: one that promises life.
May we continue to count the mounting days of resistance until victory, until regional sovereignty, and until Palestine is free.
—With editorial support from Tracy J. Jawad.
People gather near the building that housed nuclear scientists Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi and Fereydoon Abbasi Davani, who were assassinated by Israel in their homes. Sa’adat Abad, Tehran. June 13, 2025. (Fatima Joumaa/The Public Source)
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