The idea that the U.S., or any Western nation for that matter, involved in the ongoing imperialist project, could seriously see itself as a protector of human rights is bizarre and dangerous, and must be countered. The fact that the U.S. will still attempt to advance this fiction reflects either the height of arrogance or a society and administration caught in the grip of a collective national psychosis. I am convinced it is both, but more on that later.
A cognitive rupture from objective reality, the inability to locate oneself in relationship to other human beings individually and collectively in the material world are all symptoms of severe mental derangement. Yet, it appears that this is the condition that structures the psychic make-up of all of the leaders of the U.S. and the collective West.
It is what I have referred to as the psychopathology of white supremacy:
A racialized narcissistic cognitive disorder that centers so-called white people’s and European civilization and renders the afflicted with an inability to perceive objective reality in the same way as others. This affliction is not reducible to the race of so-called whites but can affect all those who have come in contact with the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the Pan-European colonial project.
How else can you explain the self-perceptions of the U.S. and West,
responsible for the most horrific crimes against humanity in the annuals
of human history from genocide, slavery, world wars, the European,
African and Indigenous holocausts, wars and subversion since 1945 that
have resulted in over 30 million lives lost – but then assert their
innocence, moral superiority and right to define the content and range
of human rights?
-- Ajamu Baraka, "For the Peoples of our Region, the Failure of Biden’s Summit of the Americas Would be a Welcome Event" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).
