The manufactured outrage over Vladimir Putin's presence at the Alaska summit was an attempt to reinforce a global racial order. The rules-based international order has always been a hierarchy of who is considered white enough and therefore human enough to be protected.
"Those who have the right to define are the masters of the situation." - Kwame Ture
Last week the world witnessed the geopolitical spectacle that took place in Anchorage, Alaska when Presidents Trump and Putin met to discuss ending the feckless, unnecessary, and fossil-fueled war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine that’s been ongoing for three years. Unsurprisingly, the three hour discussion between the leaders led to no comprehensive agreement that would, in Trump’s words, “stop the killing.” However, while the Trump/Putin meeting failed to result in an armistice, it did elucidate profound hypocrisies and revealed that when it comes to who is considered a war criminal it largely depends on who the victims are.
This is evidenced by the outrage of corporate, liberal media outlets and certain members of both “major” political parties over President Trump meeting with President Putin on U.S. soil and “rolling out the red carpet” for him in the process.
For instance, former U.S. Senator, now a regular contributor to MSNBC, aka MS(DNC) Claire McCaskill took to the airwaves to criticize President Trump for meeting with a “bully, dictator, and a criminal.” And Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), while recently speaking with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper stated, “Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. He has directed soldiers to kill women and children and bury them in mass graves. He’s kidnapping children as we speak.”
Liberal social media outlets like The Other 98%, also offered their consternation by proclaiming, “It is outrageous that Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin and treated him like an honored guest. Putin is someone who would be arrested in more than a hundred countries for war crimes, yet Trump offered him a grand welcome instead of demanding accountability.” Even sports figures contributed to the opprobrium as former National Hockey League player, Dominik Hasek, an outspoken Putin critic, noted on X (formerly Twitter), “I will never forget in my life that on August 15, 2025, American soldiers rolled out the red carpet for the greatest criminal of the 21st century.”
While it can’t be denied that President Putin has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine has taken far too many lives, many of them civilians, the conniptions expressed by liberals over Trump’s meeting with Putin lack both integrity and consistency. Take Blumenthal who while decrying a U.S. president meeting with a “war criminal” still enjoys a close and working relationship with zionist ethnostate Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In fact, Blumenthal took a meeting with Netanyahu, along with Senator Lindsay Graham, earlier this year at a Senate office. Blumenthal and Graham were not alone as Netanyahu also met with Senate leaders including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK). Netanyahu’s office even released a statement after these meetings noting that all of the senators, “expressed unqualified support for the prime minister and the State of Israel and commended Israel’s achievements in the war.”
Some months later, President Trump hosted Netanyahu at the White House for a working dinner that was televised and saw the zionist ethnostate’s prime minister thanking the president, “on behalf of Israelis and the Jewish people for being a true leader of the free world.” This visit also included what will certainly be viewed as one of the more ignominious photographs in U.S. senate history where Netanyahu is seen flanked by 14 senators of both “major” political parties - though a favorite errand boy of the zionist industrial complex, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) at least tried to hide his face as part of a botched “where’s Waldo” impersonation.
It should be noted that all of these meetings and photo ops took place months after arrest warrants were issued for Netanyahu by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity due the actions that he sanctioned against the Palestinian people. So the question becomes, where was the outrage, the anger, and the exasperation when Trump and lawmakers met with Netanyahu, an accused war criminal, not only on federal property but in the White House itself. Why didn’t we observe the same liberal talking heads from Joe Scarborough, to Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Andrea Mitchell displaying apoplectic condemnation when Netanyau, who has made multiple trips to the U.S. since his ICC indictment, met with members of Congress, the president, and high ranking members of his cabinet? Which is to say nothing of the silence from mainstream media bootlickers including Van Jones, Bakari Sellers, and Symone Sanders.
The answer to this is not so much hypocrisy, which is just a symptom of a much larger ailment. The cause for this behavior is a classic case of the psychopathology of white “supremacy.” Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) founder, Ajamu Baraka, describes this psychopathology as, “a racialized narcissistic cognitive disorder that hyper-values the beliefs, perspectives, and stated values of peoples racialized as white, and the assumption of the natural superiority of European civilization. It renders those afflicted with an inability to perceive objective reality.” He continues, “This affliction is not reducible just to those who identity, or want to identity, as “white,” but an affect all those who have encountered and been assimilated to the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the five century old, pan-European colonial project and its normalization of white “supremacy” ideology.”
This characterization explains why when it comes to the zionist ethnostate, the behavior of white liberals like Democratic Party Senators Schumer, Blumenthal, and John Fetterman is indistinguishable from that of Black, petty bourgeois liberals like Van Jones, Bakari Sellers, and Congressman RItchie Torres (D-NY). But each of their collective and respective white “supremacy” psychopathology reveals another truth that can no longer be ignored, perambulated, or debated - Palestinian people are not considered white/European, which is to say they are not even viewed as humans who qualify for protections under International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (i.e. the Geneva Convention) that white Ukrainians do.
This explains why we will never see world leaders representing Western colonial nations interrupt their summer vacations to rush to the White House for an emergency discussion on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as we just saw them do for Ukraine. It also explains why, beyond performative U.N. resolutions and recognition of a Palestinian State, there has not been a collective effort by Western nations to do all in their power to end the zionist ethnostate’s war crimes against Palestinian people nor the illegal occupation of their lands. In fact, many of these nations, the U.S. chief among them, still provide arms and financial support that allows the State of Israel to continue its genocidal war machine unabated. But the major mistake these nations and the zionist ethnostate are making is an assumption that the psychopathology of white “supremacy” solely impacts non-white people adversely. This essay will delve more into this issue.
To be clear, white “supremacy” ideology can meander its way into any political space or formation from liberals to even the hard Left. As sociologist Charles Mills reminds us, “much of white supremacy’s power is drawn from its invisibility, the taken-for-granted aspects that underwrite all other political and social contracts.” No one knew this better than Hubert Harrison. In his new book, Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, professor and scholar Dr. Brian Kwoba recalls how Harrison navigated elements of white “supremacy” in the U.S. Socialist Party that he was once a part of. As Kwoba explains, Harrison even built off arguments made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to demonstrate how white “supremacy” operates when he attempted to appeal to the Socialist Party stating, “Whenever large groups men find profit in injustice to other men, they will evolve a system of ethics to reconcile their minds to that injustice.” Harrison continued, “They cannot do wrong without calling that wrong right. That is why the capitalist class cannot even think justice so far as workers are concerned. And that is why men who think they can see a social or economic advantage for themselves in the degradation of the Negro will continue to think that degradation right.”
While Harrison made these comments in service to African people, they can easily be utilized to explain why the psychopathology of white “supremacy” cannot allow for the Palestinians to be viewed as humans by Western nations. Ukraine on the other hand, for all the collateral, structural, and economic damage it has suffered, still possesses its status as a nation of white people and members of the exclusive club of global whiteness. As such, Ukraine must be defended and preserved as a function of preserving white “supremacy” by Western actors and neocolonial formations like NATO. Palestinians, of course, do not enjoy this membership, which is why they are seen as distractions and disposable by the West and settler colonial nations like the U.S.
And much like Harrison adroitly demonstrated how Black and African people are the touchstone for the sham known as “American Democracy,” when he said, “politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic ‘idea’ because the presence of Negro puts [U.S.] democracy to the proof and reveals the falsity of it,” the situation in Palestinians has revealed that they are the touchstone of the West’s great charade, an insouciant calumny referred to as “International Human Rights Law” in lieu of a People’s Centered Human Rights approach that is primarly being advanced by the people of the global majority who tend to reside in intentionally underdeveloped nations of the so-called global south.
But as noted earlier, even “white” nations, and nations like the zionist ethnostate who do all they can to prove that they are worthy of being seen as white, including their ebullient willingness to, as Raul Peck once named, “exterminate all the brutes,” are not immune from adverse impacts associated with the psychopathology of white “supremacy.” For example, the zionist ethnostate has irrefutably emerged as the biggest pariah of the international community and all people of conscience and is reeling from its ongoing internal atrophy of the nation’s young and porous “democracy,” while it continues to carry out barbarous and maniacal military actions against numerous sovereign nations and civilians. In the same way that Harrison, as Kwoba explains, named that the “capitalist class sustains race prejudice in order to keep wages low, strikes infrequent, and workers divided,” the psychopathology of white “supremacy” is doing the same to the zionist ethnostate, whether it acknowledges it or not.
Dismantling the psychopathology of white “supremacy” is a salient and requisite step to ensure Palestinians are granted the same attention and offered the same ability to establish and maintain their inalienable self-determination as Ukraine. Paradoxically, it may also be the only way for any iteration of the State of Israel to remain in existence. To this end, it is incumbent upon all of us to recognize this psychopathology when it rears its ugly head in our collective and respective spaces and society writ large. This will only occur when people of conscience are also people of principles such that they can advance a global People(s) Centered Human Rights initiative that dispatches of white “supremacy” and its capitalist apparatus in all its forms by any and all means necessary.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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