The Perfect Victim Narrative Applied To Foreign Policy Only Keeps U.S. Imperialism Alive

Jacqueline Luqman

23 Sep 2026

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Cuban water truck supplies residents in Pinar del Río. Washington’s tightening oil blockade of the island causes power blackouts that stop water pumps, shortages of medical supplies.

The demand to call out alleged crimes in Iran or Cuba while those countries face annihilation from the U.S. and Israel is a refusal to see those people as human beings worthy of protection.

The Perfect Victim trope extends to conversations about capitalism, imperialism, and war. It is as destructive as when we use it domestically, as we are familiar with. I was confronted with this in a recent public political education session that I was conducting at my church, of all places, because the people of God finally wanted to talk about the issues that have been kicking our behinds, that they finally are experiencing themselves. So it wasn’t a great surprise that someone had very pointed opinions and accusations about and against Iran–which wasn’t even the topic of the discussion, as we were talking about socialist countries (Iran is not)--but I was still a bit taken aback by the intensity of the demand to be able to call out the country’s alleged crimes, even as they are under threat of annihilation from the Doomsday Duo, the U.S. and Israel. With support from other Western nations under U.S. influence, of course.

The way people dismiss the U.S. attacks on Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, African post-colonial states, and more, and always want to bring up the worst stories they’ve ever heard that allegedly happened in those countries is ridiculous, but consistently and predictably American, no matter what demographic you speak to.

We get anti-Russian, anti-Iranian, anti-Cuban, anti-Venezuelan, and general anti-socialist/communist and even anti-progressive rhetoric and talking points not just from politicians who want to destroy those countries for their profit margins, but also from television shows, movies, national and local news, and now, of course, social media. This is why Americans have little understanding of the history of U.S. aggression against these countries, named as enemies of “democracy,” “freedom,” and the “American way of life,” aside from the fact that Americans do not travel to these places to see for themselves, for economic and political/ideological reasons.

So when the aggression of the U.S. empire escalates from imposing brutal economic coercive measures that strangle the economy of the country and cause the most vulnerable among them to suffer the most, as their government can no longer provide support because of the sanctions, to attempted color revolutions that hijack organic protests and turn them into violent spectacles against the very institutions the people need (hospitals, power plants, local markets) in an effort to overthrow the government, to the final stage of all-out invasion, occupation, or drone bombing to allegedly “bring freedom” to those besieged people, for some who are fixated on the stories they have been told about why those countries are “anti-American,” and “authoritarian,” the only thing they care about is confirming that the awful things they’ve heard about the country are true. That helps those people justify the idea that those countries might deserve to be bombed by the U.S., if they clearly are not a “perfect” nation.

That’s an incredible take, considering every accusation against other countries from this one is really a projection of what the U.S. government does to its own citizens, let alone what it has done to millions of people around the world.

But when you realize this is the same thing people do when we talk about resistance to domestic repression, it is a lot less unbelievable that people would do this with U.S. imperialist Zionist policy internationally. When the police “unalive” someone extrajudicially, so many people focus all their time on ignoring the police actions while finding reasons that their victim “was no angel.” The implication is that had the victim been perfect in behavior, maybe they wouldn’t have been a target of the police in the first place. If they weren’t “bad people,” then maybe they’d still be alive. This is the attitude extended to the victims of imperialist Zionist U.S. foreign policy.

Instead of staying with the fact that the country that we live in has no right to attack another country simply because the people in that country chose a leader the U.S. doesn’t like, too often people will bring up Stalin or gulags or Iran’s policing or their alleged murder of innocent civilian protesters, or Castro seizing their grandfather’s land (that they won’t admit was a slave plantation). They want to argue that those countries should not be sympathized with in the face of unprovoked U.S. attacks, because look at how awful they are “to their own people.”

And they will sometimes ask why we can’t call those crimes out just because the U.S. is bombing those countries, which in any other context would be a ridiculous position to have. But they do it anyway, because they have been conditioned not to see those people as human beings at all. Just wild animals with no “civilized” attributes that would merit any recognition of their humanity, even when it is under threat of obliteration. It’s easier to get people not to care when the bombs are dropped on girls’ schools and refugee camps, and when children are forced to work in mines to extract the minerals needed for the electronic devices that transmit the videos of the human degradation, when people have already been deeply indoctrinated to see those people as their deeply flawed, barely civilized, mortal enemies for years.

And somehow these people cannot see how they are willingly giving their consent to the further dehumanization and degradation of millions of human beings around the world, all because they’re convinced that what the State Department told the media about a massacre of innocent protesters in that country was just their government being backward brutes. No mention of the involvement of the same State Department and other U.S. governmental entities that helped create the conditions that people are struggling under to the point where they feel like they need to protest in the first place, and how those protests were infiltrated and co-opted with violence by U.S./Israeli provocateurs, with no honest reflection about the rank hypocrisy of this government doing the same in this country to us and our ancestors and anyone who rejected the capitalist hierarchical and exploitative order for CENTURIES.

Sometimes I can’t tell what history people don’t know: the history of government repression of dissent in this country, or the history of repression of people in other countries that the U.S. said needed to be done because of communism/narcotrafficking/abuse of women, or any other reason they gave that was not at all the reason the intervention was carried out. Because somehow, all of those problems stubbornly persist once the U.S. has gotten its fill of bloodshed, has taken control of the country’s resources, and the people are left to deal with the rubble of the society they were trying to build for themselves.

If people who fall for this would stop and ask themselves if what they believe about those countries is WHY the U.S. is bombing them, most would respond that the answer is no. Because while the U.S. makes all these accusations about authoritarian abuses in other countries, when they decide to drop bombs on them, the reason is never that, but is always, “Protecting U.S. interests in the region.”

U.S. “interests” in a particular region are always antagonistic to the interests of the people who live there.

So what are we even talking about, if the reason that country is being bombed is NOT because of any alleged crimes that are claimed? Few will back off of their stance and will instead reiterate that the other country isn’t “innocent.” They will declare that we should be able to call that out, even if the U.S. is currently trying to destroy it and everyone in it for reasons that have nothing to do with whatever the individual insisting on their accountability is mad at the country and its leaders about.

That acknowledgment should bring people back to the actual issue for US in this country at hand — THIS GOVERNMENT BOMBING THE SHIT OUT OF COUNTRIES BECAUSE THEY WANT TO CONTROL THEM, THEIR RESOURCES, AND EXTEND U.S. ZIONIST HEGEMONY AROUND THE WORLD BY USING THAT COUNTRY AS A LAUNCHING PAD FOR ATTACKS AGAINST THE REST OF THE WORLD. But too often it doesn’t, and people get stuck in this “U.S. bad, but victim of U.S. equally as bad” narrative that creates almost an ideological draw between the two countries, or at least they perceive it to be so. Then everybody throws their hands up and walks away in frustration, claiming nothing can be done if everyone is guilty. But no one ever really discusses what the IMPERIALIST AGGRESSORS are guilty of and why they do what they do. So what this response really does is justify NOT holding the country THEY LIVE IN accountable for its crimes against other countries, by making the victim somehow deserving of the attacks.

Sure, we can criticize whatever internal issues in any country if we want to. But in the face of CENTURIES of imperialist aggression and destabilization against those countries, why are people not more focused on asking, “If the West had not destabilized these countries with election interference, interventions, coups, color revolutions, and outright war because they refused to be a servant to the West, would those alleged crimes have happened? And even if the allegations are true, are we understanding the context they occurred within the larger, incessant, all-encompassing aggression from the West, and how these acts may have been influenced in some way by it?”

“Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” makes a lot more sense than we want to admit. The constant pressure of protecting yourself from outside aggression can push you to paranoia. When you’re in hyper-vigilance mode all of the time, sometimes you do go overboard with the concept of protecting yourself, especially when you don’t know and can never tell who the enemy among you is and when they will show their hand, but you KNOW they are there.

History has proven over and over again that the spies ARE THERE, and they are doing exactly what those other leaders fear they are doing. Just look at the state of the anti-imperialist countries in the world today. Do you really think all of this heightened aggression originated under Trump? The attacks on these countries have been carried out for decades, through networks of compromised actors in those countries working for the West. And that’s just one way this government destabilizes sovereign nations’ ability to develop and govern themselves under the ideologies and economic systems they choose.

I frequently wonder if the people who bring this kind of thing up when we are talking about imperialist hegemony and anti-communism think about what would have happened if those countries had been allowed to develop along the ideologies that they chose without any interference from the West, and particularly the U.S. and its partners in depravity, the U.K. and Israel; would the discussion about them be what they allegedly did so terribly wrong today?

But we can only guess at this, because the world exists in the grip of the fascist fever dreams of genocidal imperialist Zionists. And they have made many leaders and people around the world very paranoid, because look at what they’ve done to make them that way! Look at what they have done to us right here. You can’t tell me that most of us are not suffering from some serious trauma because of the constant psychological, intellectual, historical, legal, economic, and even spiritual assault on humanity that we are subjected to in this country. We’re always talking about how we need “self-care” to ground ourselves and not burn out and lose our minds in the face of the coalescing fascism we’re living under. Still, somehow we don’t extend that reasoning to the COUNTRIES, their leaders, and the people who have endured the same—just on a much larger and more comprehensive scale. Maddeningly, illogically fascinating.

This Perfect Victim narrative, in the context of analyzing imperialist domination, does as much to demonize the victims of imperialism as it does to do the same for individuals victimized by the state. And in that way, it serves the same purpose of letting the imperialist Zionists completely off the hook as the same trope applied to individual victims of domestic state extrajudicial execution. We spend so much time arguing about the relevance of the alleged crimes and shortcomings of the person lying on the pavement after being choked out/shot up/run over by police for a simple traffic stop, that we ignore the actual reason that individual is lying on the pavement as a corpse now.

Are we really going to keep letting people hand-wring and pearl-clutch over the alleged totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and brutality of so-called enemy “regimes” and their leaders that come from the very same state that has documented designs to destroy them and take control of their resources for their profit?

Humanity cannot afford to allow that.

End ALL U.S. imperialist zionist wars and acts of aggression and domination against all justice- and peace-loving peoples around the world.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C., as well as a co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet available on YouTube (here and here) and Facebook.