Summary: Colonialism and fascism are not separate or sequential phenomena but parallel expressions of the same worldview—what this article calls the imperial mirror. Rooted in domination culture, this mindset projects hierarchy, control, and dehumanization both outward through empire and colonial conquest, and inward through authoritarianism and social repression. The second Trump presidency made this pattern starkly visible, revealing how mechanisms honed abroad—militarization, surveillance, scapegoating, and cultural erasure—were increasingly used against domestic populations. Yet the same mirror that distorts also reveals: by recognizing these reflections, societies can confront the logic of domination, reclaim suppressed truths, and begin to regenerate cultures grounded in kinship, care, and collective dignity.
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The Imperial Mirror: How Domination Culture Reflected Itself Abroad and at Home
By Zola Hartmann
A Mirror, Not a Boomerang
For generations, historians framed the return of imperial violence to its source as a kind of boomerang — something thrown out into the world that eventually arcs back to strike its origin. While that metaphor has merit, it also conceals something more fundamental: the violence was never truly elsewhere. The same worldview that justified empire abroad was always embedded at home. It didn’t return — it was merely mirrored.
This is the imperial mirror: a way of seeing and organizing the world rooted in domination. Its reflections are both outward and inward — manifesting as colonialism beyond borders and authoritarianism within them. While their expressions may differ, their roots are the same: hierarchy, control, dehumanization, and the belief in a right to rule.
Understanding this mirror is key to understanding the trajectory of the last age, including the resurgence of authoritarianism in former empires like the United States. The clearest recent example was the second presidency of Donald Trump, which laid bare what had long been latent in American political and cultural life — not a rupture, but a revelation.
The Architecture of Domination
To grasp how this mirror operates, we must look at its foundations. Domination culture rests on several interlocking beliefs:
That humans are separate from and superior to nature.
That some groups of people are superior to others.
That progress is achieved through control, competition, and extraction.
That the world is a machine to be mastered, not a living system to be tended.
These beliefs emerged not from a single point in history but from a long arc — including the agricultural revolution, the rise of patriarchal systems, the birth of organized religion and centralized states, and the accumulation of property and power. They found modern expression through empire.
Empire provided a stage for these assumptions to play out — a testing ground and a theater. And as it turned its gaze outward to conquer others, it held up a mirror to itself, shaping domestic institutions in the same image.
Empire Outward: The Logic of Colonialism
Colonialism was domination culture in motion. It justified conquest with the language of civilization and progress, but its foundations were theft, labor exploitation, and epistemicide — the destruction of other ways of knowing.
The Spanish and British empires carved up the world, erasing Indigenous cultures, enslaving millions, and reshaping ecologies. The Belgian Congo stands as one of the most grotesque examples: a corporate monarchy driven by rubber extraction, enforced by terror. Millions died under Leopold II’s regime, their hands cut off for missing quotas.
The United States, too, followed this pattern — through its expansion across the continent, the subjugation of Native nations, and later, interventions across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. All justified by democracy and freedom, yet enacted through coups, occupations, and economic domination.
Colonialism wasn’t just geopolitical — it was psychological. It trained the colonizer to dehumanize the colonized, to see others as resources, threats, or obstacles. And it trained societies to normalize hierarchy as inevitable.
Empire Inward: The Logic of Fascism
What was tested abroad was later refined at home. This is the core of the imperial mirror: the same logic that justified colonialism — dehumanization, control, and hierarchy — was turned inward in the form of authoritarianism and fascism.
Fascism is not a foreign ideology imported by accident. It is empire repatriated.
In Nazi Germany, Hitler dreamed of empire in Eastern Europe, but his techniques of domination — surveillance, racial purification, militarized control — echoed earlier colonial regimes. Mussolini’s Italy invoked the Roman Empire not just as metaphor but as destiny, bringing colonial fantasies home.
The United States offers a subtler, but no less powerful, example. Jim Crow laws, redlining, police violence, internment camps, and the suppression of Indigenous and Black sovereignty were all colonial mechanisms applied domestically. The war on drugs, the militarization of police, and mass incarceration further entrenched this logic. The so-called “internal colonies” of marginalized communities were policed and managed through techniques perfected abroad.
The mirror was always there. Trump’s second presidency simply shattered the glass.
The Second Trump Presidency: A Mirror Made Plain
When Donald Trump returned to power, many called it a democratic crisis. But that assumes something broke. In truth, something was clarified.
Trump’s second term was a culmination, not a deviation. It represented the internalization of the imperial mindset — the application of war-making logic to domestic governance.
Key features included:
Institutional Capture: The executive branch absorbed or neutralized judicial and legislative counterbalances. Loyalists were placed in key positions to erode checks on power.
Surveillance and Repression: AI surveillance programs monitored activists, journalists, and political opponents. Whistleblowers disappeared. Digital censorship intensified under the pretense of national security.
Militarization: Federal troops were used to quell protests. Police forces became indistinguishable from the military in both gear and tactics.
Cultural Purging: Education was rewritten to support nationalist narratives. History was cleansed of uncomfortable truths. Libraries, museums, and media were defunded or co-opted.
Scapegoating and Fear: Immigrants, queer people, academics, and artists were vilified. The nation was told it was under siege — not by foreign enemies, but from within.
This was not the arrival of fascism — it was its flourishing under new conditions. And it echoed the very tactics the U.S. had once employed abroad: install loyal regimes, suppress dissent, extract loyalty, erase difference.
Cultural and Psychological Reflections
The mirror does not just reflect politics — it reflects psyche and culture. A people trained to dominate others becomes fragmented internally. Fear replaces empathy. Control replaces care.
Domination requires projection: the parts of ourselves we disown — vulnerability, uncertainty, interdependence — are cast onto others. Those others are then punished for embodying what we refuse to face.
This is how domination works: by dividing self from self, society from society, and species from world. It breeds mistrust and numbness. It teaches that power means separation, not connection.
Art, ritual, and relationship — the very things that could undo this logic — are dismissed as weak or dangerous. The imperial mirror makes it hard to see clearly — but not impossible.
Cracks in the Mirror: The Persistence of Resistance
Wherever domination exists, so does resistance. Across time and continents, people have remembered what the mirror tries to erase.
Indigenous movements preserved land-based knowledge and cosmologies despite brutal repression. Anti-colonial struggles from Algeria to Vietnam revealed the fragility of empire. Civil rights, feminist, queer, and ecological movements wove alternative maps of power.
Even under Trump’s rule, resistance never vanished. It went underground, turned communal, took root in food, language, and kinship. Artists whispered truths. Elders passed down memory. Mutual aid networks flourished.
These cracks in the mirror grew wider — and through them, another world became visible.
Beyond the Mirror: Reclaiming the World
Domination is not destiny. It is a story — powerful, yes, but not eternal. And like all stories, it can be rewritten.
Across the ruins of empire, seeds of another culture took root. A culture of partnership — not hierarchy. Of regeneration — not extraction. Of reverence — not control.
This new-old way drew on ancient memory and emerging science. It centered relationship, reciprocity, and collective care. It saw diversity as strength, not threat. It embraced the world as kin.
It did not erase history. It composted it.
Facing Ourselves
The imperial mirror showed us who we thought we were. It showed us what we feared, what we wanted to suppress, and what we projected onto others.
But it also showed us what we longed for beneath the surface — connection, dignity, wholeness.
In the end, it was not the empire that defined us, but our willingness to face it. To learn from its reflections. To refuse its logic.
And in doing so, we reclaimed not only the world, but ourselves.
Zola Hartmann is a cultural historian and systems thinker whose work explores the intersections of power, memory, and regeneration. With ancestral roots in both West Africa and Central Europe, she brings a unique perspective to the legacies of empire and the emergence of post-dominance cultures. Hartmann writes from the Sahel-Mediterranean bioregion.