By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –

On White Supremacy

Our generation has a privileged ringside view of the death struggles of White Supremacy. The twin legacies of the western Enlightenment – Rationalism and Humanism – are melting before our eyes, like the steel frames of New York’s Twin Towers did on 9/11; the Liberal Order that served to mask White Supremacy’s rapaciousness is crumbling. The US-led NATO’s policy mandarins are trapped in Imperialism’s necessary drive to expand economic markets and seek out resource rich and strategically located territories; their ideological blinkers block lessons from the string of military defeats in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Unsurprisingly they are throwing good money after bad in Israel and Ukraine gambling on a favourable outcome; they are emasculating, if not jettisoning, the post-WW2 international legal regime – Humanitarian Laws and Geneva Conventions – and the associated institutions – the ICJ and ICC – that stand in the way of their savage lunge to salvage the failing western domination.

White Supremacy took root in the Americas around five centuries ago during the early European mercantile empires of Portugal and Spain and spread under subsequent European colonialisms. The British empire entrenched White Supremacy while the European colonial plunder (Primitive Accumulation, in the Marxian lexicon) nourished Eric Hobsbawm’s Dual Revolutions – French Political and British Industrial – from the late 18^th to mid-19^th Centuries that contributed scientific breakthroughs, seminal social and political thought and artistic achievements. They are the main vectors that shifted the global economic and, with it, the political centres of gravity from Asia to Western Europe for the first time about three centuries ago. Before the dawn of the 18^th Century the civilizational centres of gravity were located in and around primarily the River Valleys of Nile, Indus, Vaigai and Huang He rivers where civilisations grew and flourished for many millennia.

At the end of the 1^st WW, after the Entente Powers dislodged and carved up the Muslim Ottoman Empire by drawing the Sykes-Picot lines in the sand, the momentum of European social advances partially spilled over to strengthen the rapidly expanding United States empire. The empire, fattened over a century on the colonial extraction in Latin America and the Caribbean under the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, inherited the West’s primacy in the inter-war period and beyond.

The anti-colonial revolutions in the second half of the 20^th Century won political independence in most former colonies and began dragging the global political centre of gravity back toward Asia and Africa. The newly independent States constitute the vast majority of UN’s member-states – 193 in 2025, quickly up from 51 in 1945. The militarily weakened, resource poor European colonial powers, having lost most colonies, adjusted to neo-colonialism: British imperialism camouflaged itself as the British Commonwealth and French imperialism rebranded as the CFA Franc System.

The US White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) ruling class leveraged the military umbrella it extended within NATO to keep afloat European neo-colonialism swiftly replaced the fading European colonisers at the top of West’s imperial pecking order. Its power peaked when the last challenger standing, the Soviet empire, imploded, the Warsaw Pact shredded and Socialism retreated in 1989-91. The WASP elite’s Cold War victory over USSR’s Slavic ruling class positioned it at the pinnacle of a US-dominated unipolar moment in the first decade of the 1990s that appeared to vindicate the assumed Manifest Destiny.

A Manifest Destiny?

The predominantly British settler colonialists or “Pilgrim Fathers”, bent on their rapacious land grab and mass murder of indigenous American Indians in the 13 Colonies, had avidly devoured their ideologue John L. O’Sullivan’s 1845 pseudo-scientific, divinely ordained “theory” of Manifest Destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, or Christian Zionism that sanctified land expropriation, rape, slaughter and genocide of the pre-colonial so-called “savages”. After the US Civil War the racist venom lubricated settler colonialists’ conquering juggernaut that barrelled westward, robbing vast swaths of the Spanish-conquered lands of the Mayan Civilization and virtually obliterating most North American Indian Nations (the Apache, Sioux, Navajo and others), to deeply root the US settler colony. The destruction was both official and systematic. The settler colonial regime and the military periodically criminalised the Indian Nations’ Resistance to forced assimilation, land theft and violence by proclaiming them by law as “hostiles”, which designated them as enemies who could and were eliminated without mercy.

The brutal settler colonialism did not spare even children. Under the US government’s Indian Boarding School Policy, officials “forcibly abducted” and spirited countless obviously screaming American Indian and Alaskan Native children away from their no doubt weeping Indian mothers and effectively incarcerated them in “526 government-funded, and often church-run, Indian boarding schools across the U.S. in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries.” The stated aim was to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”: cultural genocide or ethnocide. The children were severely punished for speaking their mother tongue and invariably physically and sexually abused; the US government has yet to account for vast majority of disappeared children. As recently as 1925 there were at least 60,000 children in the so-called “schools”. The fates of Canada’s Inuit and Australia’s Aborigines are not very different.

The tragedy of enslaved African-Americans is well known.

Almost in parallel Britain’s Herbert Spencer corrupted Charles Darwin’s theory of biological natural selection into the racial formulation of “Social Darwinism” and claimed the “superior” white Anglo-Saxon race inevitably reached the social evolutionary pinnacle, leaving in its wake the “inferior” coloured races. His “theory” infused ideological legitimacy to Britain’s colonial plunder on a near global scale. The corrosive poisonous mix of Christian Zionism and Social Darwinism spread to other settler colonies in the Anglosphere and similarly devastated the pre-colonial Nations in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The rise of Social Darwinism in the context of US predatory capitalism, unmediated by pre-capitalist values of collective living, pitted all against all; it blinded settler colonialists from recognising that we exist within relationships in society. The mental block is evocatively captured by the denigration “he is a loser”, a common refrain directed at rare individuals who courageously express civilised values of compassion and tolerance among the descendants of US settler colonialists.

The ruing classes of Europe’s colonial powers eagerly imbibed Spencer’s social racism underpinned by the pseudo-scientific racism of Eugenics, invented by Britain’s Francis Galton; together with Manifest Destiny, the three cultural fabrications disgorged the fourth, the Master Race “theory” of European Fascism, let loose by Italy’s Benito Mussolini and perfected by Germany’s self-professed Aryan Nazis. Their deep and persisting influence oozed from the analogy the EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy (Josep Borell) drew in 2022: “Europe is a garden” he said; “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle. The jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it”. We have seen the US and European “gardeners” desperately slashing the “jungle” in Indo-China, West Asia and North Africa, to mention but a few.

As we write Israel’s settler colonial “gardeners”, tutored by Britain and outfitted by the US, regularly “mow the lawn” to liquidate Palestinians men, women and children. (One cannot help but wonder what inspiration, if any, nationalist Sinhalese-Buddhists, who claim to speak an Aryan tongue, may be deriving from the European “horticulturists”.)

However, the “jungle” resists and grows ever denser.

Western domination unravels

The Russian Federation, feebly staggering to its feet out of the USSR’s ashes, and the Peoples Republic of China, barely gathering speed, seemed at best unthreatening “jungles”. In January 2015, Sen. John McCain confidently mocked: “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country”

Drunk on the post-Cold War triumphalism and enthused by seemingly unchallenged US power, Washington’s Neo-Conservatives – the ideologues of the ruing class and public face of the Deep State – led by William Kristol and Robert Kagan stitched together The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a 1992 Neo-Conservative think tank, “to promote American global leadership”, an odious euphemism for US Imperialism. In the same year their apparent political mentor Frances Fukuyama obligingly repackaged Spencer’s Social Darwinism in his The End of History and the Last Man; he asserted US Capitalism and its associated version of Liberal-Democracy constitute the pinnacle of human evolution and boldly predicted that their institutions would hold sway for the rest of time.

Many academics in some elite US universities, swaying like cobras to a snake charmer’s circling flute, bought into Fukuyama’s ahistorical, irretrievably flawed “theory” since it confirmed their irrational biases favouring White Supremacy. They rewarded him with lucrative academic sinecures; the mindless veneration by predominantly white, male journalists in mainstream western media’s followed soon after. Probably emboldened by the accolades, the PNAC’s coterie of Neo-Cons and liberal interventionists – “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia” – promoted the delusionary quest to turn the anomaly of three centuries of western domination and its temporary unipolar moment into an unending US-ruled unipolar world system.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser and Neo-Con Zbigniew Brzezinski fleshed out PNAC’s vision; he crafted the geo-strategic blueprint in his 1997 The Grand Chessboard to subdue the two rising Eurasian powers – first the weaker Russia and, eventually, China – and entrench US primacy in Eurasia. Brzezinski, a Polish immigrant, carried a toxic historical baggage, a revulsion for everything Russian that is rooted in Poland’s several centuries of resistance to the oppressive Tsarist Empire; he poured the malevolence into his Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski approvingly noted, “Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin shared the assumption that Eurasia is the centre of the world and that he who controls Eurasia controls the world.” The first step, he explained in the Chessboard, is “the initiation of Ukraine’s progressive inclusion” within the US sphere of influence during “the decade 2005-2015”.

US control over Ukraine, underlined Brzezinski in 1997, is fundamental to impede the resurgence of the post-Soviet “weak Russia”. For that would interdict the bulk of Russia’s overland energy export to Europe – an important revenue stream – through pipelines across Ukraine. What’s more Russia’s Black Sea fleet could be barred from its main, Sevastopol base in Ukraine’s Crimea and thereby block Moscow’s vital gateway to the Mediterranean and the world beyond. Stratfor, a web-based geopolitical analysis platform, said to have close links to US espionage agencies, asserted in 2004: “without Ukraine Russia’s political, economic and military survivability are called into question…Without Ukraine, Russia is doomed to a painful slide into geopolitical obsolescence and ultimately, perhaps even non-existence.”

The US Deep State, “men in dark suit wearing blue tie”, who instruct Presidents on what they can do, cannot do and must do, operationalized Brzezinski’s scheme; they violated the solemn commitment offered by the US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to not expand NATO “one inch eastward”, during negotiations over the 1989-90 reunification of West and East Germany. By 2020 NATO, led by Washington, repeatedly breeched the commitment; it incorporated in stages 14 new Central and Eastern European countries despite Moscow’s repeated and increasingly vehement objections that NATO’s advance towards Russia’s border is an existential security threat. Successive US Presidents’ administrations strategized to draw Ukraine into the US orbit, establish NATO military bases on Russia’s border and, as Brzezinski schemed, to take control of the Sevastopol naval base.

Putin neutralized Washington’s gambit in March 2014, six months before the Maidan Coup; he retrieved Crimea, which Nikita Khrushchev (a Ukrainian native) had handed over in 1953, and incorporated Sevastopol within Russia’s sovereign territory through a successful referendum in Crimea.

Nevertheless, the bloody process to incorporate Ukraine within US’ sphere of influence moved into high gear; the Deep State and its point person, Victoria Nuland executed the August 2014 Maidan coup (within the decade projected by Brzezinski) that overthrew the centrist President Viktor Yanukovych. Nuland recounted in her 2016 Congressional Testimony with evident relish how the US agencies have thoroughly penetrated and control Ukraine.

That crossed Moscow’s publicly announced Red Line.

Russia’s strategic defeat?

The US administrations of Presidents Barack Obama (2013 – 2016) and Donald Trump (2016 – 2020), together with their NATO allies, financed, armed and trained their vassal, Ukraine’s neo-Nazi military, and pointed its nose toward Russia – a grisly replay of the West grooming Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces in the 1930s as a dagger aimed at the heart of Moscow.

The US-led NATO desperately strategized to claw back Crimea; they imposed economic sanctions – the modern variant of medieval Siege Warfare – and ratcheted up the pressure by increasing “sanctions from hell” up to more than 25,000 to starve Russia into submission.

Apparently the strategy’s failure later impelled the former British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace to urge: “We need to choke the life out of Crimea”, make it “inhabitable”. Was he following the “precedent” set by Israel bombing Gaza to rubble to make it unliveable?

The economic war escalated into a military one when Moscow, goaded to militarily defend its vital interests, retaliated with the February 2022 Special Military Operation; but NATO’s propaganda blitz disingenuously accused Moscow of “unprovoked” aggression. The US espionage agencies, and a few subservient European ones, together blew up the Nord Stream 1 energy pipeline to block Russia selling energy to Germany and EU in order to further degrade Russia’s economy. Then President Joe Biden had confidently declared: the “Ruble” will be “rubble”. Trump chimed in to disparage Russia as a “paper tiger” that has failed to defeat the smaller Ukraine for more than three years and counting.

In effect Biden and Trump played into Putin’s hands. They validated his strategy of executing a slow motion war of attrition that cannot be exaggerated by Washington, to its domestic political constituency, as an immediate and existential threat that legitimated a nuclear response.

On the other hand, the war hysteria to justify the rearmament by NATO’s EU members to take over and pursue the war in Ukraine contradicted Trump; they asserted the “paper tiger” is in fact a mighty Russian Bear that, after gobbling Ukraine, would make mince meat of most of Europe. President Emmanuel Macron offered to extend France’s “nuclear deterrent” to the European Continent. None of this will arrest Europe’s terminal decline and only confirm Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah’s seminal insight in his 1965 “Neo-colonialism, the last stage of Imperialism”.

However, hope rarely dies. The NATO-trained and equipped Ukrainian military (not NATO’s own forces) must, they pounded, “decimate” Russia’s army; the economically deprived and politically demoralized and Russian people, they fantasized, would rebel, “overthrow” their President Vladimir Putin and welcome the NATO forces. Washington, the narrative continued, could then follow through to install a “democratic” ruler (read: a satrap), chop the Russian Federation up into its European, Siberian and Asian chunks, and serve the Federation’s natural resources up for the delectation of western TNCs, ostensibly for the lofty ideal of “liberating” non-Russian nationalities.

The EU’s Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas in May 2024 concluded thus: “Russia’s defeat is not a bad thing”, she assured Europeans, since the Federation’s “many different nations” could become separate States. She alluded to de-colonisation: “I think if you would have more like small nations…it is not a bad thing if the big power is actually [made] much smaller”, palpably stoking the elites of the “different nations” to take the cue and revolt against Moscow.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recounted an exchange with then US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the same subject during an interview by Tucker Carlson. When Lavrov confronted Blinken, “you want to uh inflict strategic defeat upon Russia he [Blinken] said no no no no it is not. It is not strategic defeat uh globally it is only in Ukraine.” Did Blinken assume others are more stupid that he is?

The unfolding catastrophe in Ukraine is a far cry for the heady days when Champaign corks popped in Washington and Brussels in February 2022 as NATO leaders rejoiced over their “success” in prodding Moscow to launch its Special Military Operation. They shovelled military supplies and financial resources to Kyiv and plotted to turn Ukraine into Moscow’s Vietnam (as they had schemed to but failed, in Afghanistan).

The wheels have come off the US-led NATO Imperialism’s grand design to exploit Ukraine as a political condom to violate Russia. The sanctions, explained Putin, unlocked Russia’s economic potential. The country’s economy has grown and is growing stronger; its military by most accounts has surpassed Imperialism’s in manpower, firepower and battle experience and has deployed the peerless conventional intermediate-range missile codenamed Oreshnik. The Russian army is steadily advancing along the entire Ukraine front; by all reliable accounts Russia is cruising to victory.

Panic stricken Washington turned in desperation to cannibalise its erstwhile allies. Trump commanded the G7 partner Canada to become a US federal state; he insisted NATO member Denmark must concede Iceland to the US; and he imposed punitive tariffs on the EU and compelled Brussels to capitulate to US trade preferences.

The rise of China

While Washington and NATO obsessed over neutralising Russia, the meteoric rise of the Peoples Republic of China, which Brzezinski sanguinely viewed as a distant peril in the 1990s, caught Washington and Brussels off balance. Though Obama hastily pivoted East in November 2011 inter alia to supposedly “engage” (read, to “contain”) China, the “Yellow Peril” was up and running. The West’s strategy planners understandably took some time to overcome reassuring memories of US soldiers belittling the Chinese, during the Korean War, as fit only to “pull rickshaws and sell their sisters”; they have yet to get their head around how, by 2010, the same Chinese raised their country to be a peer economic competitor of the US and, by 2020, a peer military rival.

Moreover, Beijing’s declared policy of “peaceful rise” so far has vitiated the propaganda by the US military-industrial-financial ruing class to balloon China up as an immediate and existential threat to justify, to its national political base, the use of tactical if not strategic nuclear weapons. An armed response is assuming urgency in Washington since President Xi Jinping is skilfully applying Sun Tzu’s ancient advice of “winning without fighting”.

Mortally rattled Washington is throwing caution to the wind. Trump is demanding Kabul hand over Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base strategically positioned close to China’s Muslim-majority Xinjiang Province, in which the CIA had promoted Uighur nationalism between 2000 and 2020, and within striking distance of the country’s nuclear facility. Perhaps he is leveraging the return of Afghanistan’s Sovereign Funds stolen by Washington in return for leasing the Base and, knowing Trump’s avarice, for his personal investments too in the country’s vast mineral resources. He also issued a Mafia-like threat that “bad things are going to happen” if Kabul refuses. The Taliban leadership has so far flatly rejected the demand.

The Collective West, consisting mainly of Britain, its settler colonies (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the EU countries, unflinchingly bolster their “Daddy”, Trump. However they constitute the global minority of around 15 per cent while the white population within the Collective West stands fewer than 13 per cent of the world.

Ranged against, is the global majority of at least 85 per cent. It includes the deepening trilateral alliance between rising China, resurgent Russia and energy-rich Iran, with India close behind, and backed by other BRICS members. They constitute a formidable force for multipolarity and a likely insurmountable challenge to the Collective West’s three centuries of global domination and associated White Supremacy.

*The author is an independent researcher who read for the Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge. He was Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies and Faculty Member of Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration.