Politics & Power Quote by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Domination, Ahmadinejad argues, doesn’t begin with tanks; it begins with mirrors. The line is built to reframe geopolitics as a psychological crime: the real conquest is not territory but identity, not resources but self-belief. As a piece of statesman rhetoric, it’s shrewdly prosecutorial. “The system of domination” is deliberately abstract, a faceless machine rather than a named enemy, which lets listeners map it onto whatever power they already distrust: the US, “the West,” global media, international finance. Vagueness becomes utility.

The triad - culture, identity, self-confidence - escalates from the external to the internal. Culture can be censored or commodified. Identity can be rewritten through education, language, and status. Self-confidence is the final target because once a society doubts its own legitimacy, it becomes governable without constant force. That’s the subtextual move: coercion is most efficient when it feels like common sense.

Context matters. Ahmadinejad rose as a populist hardliner in an Iran under sanctions and constant scrutiny over its nuclear program, speaking to both domestic audiences and a broader “Global South” constituency primed by histories of colonial extraction and cultural humiliation. The quote taps that memory while also laundering a domestic political claim: criticism of Iran’s leadership can be recoded as an attack on “true identity.” It’s anti-imperial language that can double as a shield for internal control, insisting unity is survival and dissent is collaboration with the “system.”