The Imperial Boomerang

Imperialism usually happens in a separate place; it’s an overpowering of “the other.” All of its unpleasantness falls on the shoulders of the colonized, not the colonists. But Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire noticed imperial barbarism usually travels like a boomerang, eventually returning home to the colonizers’ doorstep.

Europe inflicted centuries of imperialism on the Global South but then “one fine day the bourgeoisie [was] awakened by a terrific boomerang effect” as imperialism returned to Europe in the form of 20th century Nazism. Césaire argues that before Europe became the victims of Nazism, “they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”

The imperialistic genocide that Europe inflicted on Kenya, the Congo, Madagascar, and other countries in the Global South for money and power boomeranged back and spread through Europe as homegrown facism.

Aimé Césaire argues that it is the rottenness of imperialism and colonialism that dooms it and its perpetrators from the start. He calls it a “prelude to Disaster and the forerunner of Catastrophe,” a policy that “will perish from the void it has created around itself.” A colonizing nation can do nothing but grow more and more barbaric each day, especially if it refuses to face its horrific past, make reparations, and change its ways. 

Some Americans are shocked by this administration’s decision to dismantle the social programs and institutions that hundreds of millions of Americans depend on every day. Some Americans are outraged by the restructuring of economic policies that siphon money from the working class to provide tax cuts for the richest few. Some Americans are shocked by the mass deportations and canceled visas and political prisoners who aren’t allowed due process. They take to social media to shout, “This isn’t America! This isn’t who we are! This isn’t our way!” But as Césaire pointed out about Europe in the 1940s, the cruelty and barbarism of America’s current domestic policies is exactly who America is and has been since its inception.

It’s the same cruelty and barbarism that killed over 55 million Indigenous people in a genocidal land grab, a history that is still swept under the rug as manifest destiny. It’s the same cruelty and barbarism that built the American Empire’s earliest economy—an economy that depended on millions of enslaved people for hundreds of years. It’s the same cruelty and barbarism that wrote the Fugitive Slave Act and created Jim Crow and supported redlining policies and showed up and smiled for the camera at lynchings across the South. It’s the same cruelty and barbarism that usurps state owned oil reserves and hijacks the government of a North African country or writes “Finish them!” on an artillery shell before sending it into a Palestinian hospital or apartment complex.

And American policy always perpetrates this cruelty and barbarism with a huge side of exceptionalism, dressed up in freedom-liberty-and-justice-for-all rhetoric. The most powerful people in America are able to move through daily life above this violence—and in many ways because of this violence—and are therefore not interested in dismantling it or even admitting that it exists. And that brings us to the other way that the violence of the imperial boomerang returns to the ruling class. Césaire explains that “the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”

Never in the history of the United States has our government not been fighting—frequently with itself—to treat some group of “others” as animals, and always at the service of imperialism. And at this current moment when the imperial boomerang has returned to the homefront of the US in a big way, this country is faced with yet another opportunity to decide what to do with that boomerang. And for many Americans, that involves admitting that the boomerang exists to begin with.

Source: Aimé Césaire’s