Imperial Boomerang

The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.


Major adversaries that the empire cannot compete with. Regional powers that the empire cannot subdue. Allies that the empire starts to cannibalize. And finally the empire sheds the facade of democracy and an emperor emerges.
All signs of a declining empire.
You warned us year after year. Our “luxury of indifference” is paying itself forward. My white friend after stating how ‘frightened’ she was in the isolated Colo mtns, requested I “Please, stop. ❤️Small doses only. Today, I had to walk away, but I will be at the next protest.”…. After telling her I was watching live stream interviews on Substack. I’m convinced I’ll be friendless by the end of the month