Imperial Boomerang

With growing state repression and mass surveillance spreading across so-called western democracies: from enforced disappearances in the US, mass arrests and brutal treatment of peaceful protesters in the UK and Germany, to oligarchic control of media platforms, we must heed the warnings of scholars of fascism and authoritarianism.

We must also understand that while some of the technologies enabling this repression are new, the tactics are not new per se, they are simply new to, well, us.  Once we look beyond our own borders, we can see that such tactics have been in use for centuries by our governments on other populations, in particular through colonialism.

While there are different forms of colonialism, from settler colonialism to exploitation colonialism, the aim is almost always to dominate and control another people and often their land. While not all empires had colonies, nor were all colonising countries empires, colonialism was a tool of many empires. The violence and oppression unleashed on colonised people was, and still is, often deliberately undertaken as experiments, as laboratories of cruelty. 

What often happens, however, is that such tactics make their way back home. Aimé Césaire, who coined the term ‘imperial boomerang’ argued in Discourse on Colonialism that the brutal treatment of native populations by European colonial powers leads to fascism at home. 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt also referred to the boomerang effect suggesting that the tools used by Nazi Germany was violence perpetrated elsewhere brought home. The genocide perpetrated against the Herero, Nama and San people of what is today Namibia, was brought home to Europe. Césaire believed that western countries were only outraged by the murder of millions of Jews and other peoples in the Holocaust because its victims were white Europeans.

While many of us believed that the founding of the United Nations and international treaties that emerged following the second world war was a new dawn where humans would not let such horrors happen again, the truth was, it was only never meant to happen at home. 

Césaire referred to this as pseudo-humanism, where these concepts of rights of man, he said, were “narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.”

A crucial element in Césaire’s thesis is what he called ‘‘thingification’ where in order to justify its colonialism, the colonised people must be seen and treated as uncivilised, as barbarians in the eyes of the coloniser. And their history, cultures, lives, must be destroyed in order to give meaning to the coloniser. But, Césaire argued, in this act of dehumanising the other, they in fact, dehumanise themselves. 

Colonial activity, enterprise and conquest is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, and in order for the coloniser to ease his conscience, he gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, he accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, but in that process, transforms himself into an animal.

This behaviour, Césaire warned, would degrade Europe itself because a nation which colonises, a civilisation which justifies colonisation—and therefore force—is already a sick civilisation, a civilisation which is morally diseased: the lies, the racial pride, boastfulness, will lead to savagery.

“And then one fine day, the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss,” he writes, and if it’s not careful, Europe “will perish from the void it has created around itself.”

There is a cruel irony in seeing such tactics make their way back home. While outrage and indignation are understandable, we must resist the urge to dwell on the “how can this happen to us” sentiment, and practice some humility.

While there might be growing consensus that colonialism was (and still is) abominable and is still having negative consequences across the world, in the process of decolonisation, which accelerated with the founding of the United Nations, one system of domination replaced another, now called development, with financial incentives and charities showing up to help (essentially colonialism with ethical branding). 

Little attention, if any, is placed on the sickness of our own societies. And as long as that work is not done, we will continue to support, relativise and profit from genocide and other mass atrocities. We are the ones who need help.

However we choose to respond to the repression we may face, we must go beyond just tackling our own issues at home and extend our understanding and actions beyond concepts like peace, and instead join the fight for liberation for all people, because it is ours too. 

As Kwame Ture said “there’s a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? You can have injustice and have peace. You can have peace and be enslaved, so peace isn’t the answer—liberation is the answer… ‘peace’ is the white man’s word, ‘liberation’ is our word.” 

Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes


References
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Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire. 

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt.
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Further Resources

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Francesca Albanese, A/80/492: "Gaza Genocide: a collective crime" – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. - Advance unedited version