On The Imperial Boomerang
‘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.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.’
— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)
For the past several weeks, Western media has found itself in somewhat of a scramble. The re-election of Donald Trump has vastly accelerated the radicalisation of those within the imperial core by following the Handbook of Overt Fascism step-by-step.
However, it seems that nearly every Western country is suffering under increasingly similar deteriorating conditions, be it under a liberal or conservative government. The ever-increasing prices for basic needs such as food and housing; the increasing privatisation of essentials such as gas, electricity, and water; the acceptance of bigotry — misogyny, racism, homophobia — leading to a rise in hate crimes and police brutality against marginalised peoples; increased homelessness; an increasingly militarised police force with exponential budget increases, directly contributing to failing civil infrastructures, which incentivise governments to promote privatisation; and healthcare, transportation, housing, education, community services, and art and culture services becoming increasingly inaccessible to the average citizen are just a few things worth noting. What we have been told for so long to fear about our avowed communist counterparts, has in fact been encroaching itself into our day to day lives for the last twenty years. State repression has transcended the bi-partisan lines all over the Western world.
The Imperial Boomerang according to Aimé Césaire is the idea that the repressive techniques the West has developed to control and oppress colonised nations will eventually be deployed against their own citizens. One of the most crucial points Césaire drives home in his text is that the West did not defeat Nazism, nor did it ever intend to. America and Western Europe did not go to war with the Third Reich because they fundamentally disagreed with Nazi ideology. But rather, because Hitler’s sovereignty threatened their own. Once he made it clear he intended to take over Europe, he became an enemy of the Western colonial project, which he used as inspiration for the Holocaust.
By completely abandoning the guise of decorum and social progress, Trump has wholly disrupted this establishment order for overtly revealing to the public what it intends to do. While Liberalism would covertly enact the same policies within the imperial core as they do in the Global South, Trump expresses his desires explicitly, catalysing a system for settler-colonialism abroad and techno-feudalism within his own society. Despite public condemnation from Liberal Western leaders such as Sir Kier Starmer and Justin Trudeau, they too implement policies that fall in line with these aformentioned systems.
If any one politician has the power to take away the basic human rights of an entire population at any moment's notice, then we fundamentally do not live in a system of equality. Now that it is becoming clear that the ruling political class intends to erode the quality of life for everyone in exchange for continued excessive wealth, there is growing moral outrage amongst those who once considered themselves beneficiaries of this system.
Western society has never provided us with “inalienable rights”, only with conditional privileges. Is it fair then that we are only angry and scared as we should be, when it seems that we might finally experience what has been allowed to be enacted onto others for decades, with little to no objection? At least now perhaps we can officially say that the tide is finally turning. But how high did that pile of bodies have to climb before the West decided things needed to change? How many more will die, both here and in the Global South, before the imperial core finally revolts?
By Sylphia Basak