The Imperial Boomerang
And the need to break the cycle
Happy Friday and a belated Happy New Year!
I hope that you had a restful break and that the start to the year has been kind to you. We moved last week, so it was rather manic on my end, especially while also navigating work and winter illnesses. We are at least in now and mostly unpacked, even if a ton of sorting and organizing remains in our future…
The first post back after a long break is always one I find difficult to write. Where do I start? Sure, there have been some interesting innovation and technology pieces come out over the past few weeks. I’m sure I’ll share them over the coming weeks. But they aren’t the real story, are they?
As we start the year, I can’t help but feel that the story we are seeing is that Hannah Arendt’s “boomerang effect” is happening with chilling clarity and speed right before our eyes.
For Arendt and other anti-colonial writers, such Aimé Césaire, the horrors of Nazi Germany and the USSR did not arise out of nothing. As Lindsey Stonebridge describes in her book on Arendt, We Are Free To Change The World, they “pointed out that from where they were standing the tearing of people from their land and homes, pushing them into camps and slave labor, turning lives into commodities and wars into a means of ethnic cleansing, appeared neither novel in their coolly administered execution nor unprecedented in their cruelty.”
Indeed, these effects were “structural to the way the modern world was organized,” and the “long history that made mass displacement an everyday reality began with racism, imperialism, and the seemingly insatiable expansion of global capitalism.” Eventually, and inevitably, they boomeranged back.
It is hard to look at what is happening in the world right now as little other than this boomerang effect in action once again.
Naked imperialist and capitalist moves like the US’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s leader and the attempted appropriation of the country’s oil reserves, the military threats to seize Greenland, the use of state-sanctioned force to murder individuals and tear them from their families, and Musk’s profiteering from CSAM are not manifestations of something new.
Much as Arendt and others have clearly traced the origins of mid-century totalitarianism in its broad bush to imperialism and capitalism and its specifics to things like Jim Crow laws or British concentration camps in South Africa, so too is our current moment just the latest echo of many different actions.
While the killing of Renee Good has sparked mass-protests in the US, it is but the latest example of a long history of police murders. The main difference is that these have historically happened disproportionately to Black and racialized individuals.
Likewise, the utter abrogation of international law in seizing Maduro follows a rich history of US interventions in Latin America. The ineffectual international response to that and to threats against Greenland resembles the lacklustre response to the actions of Israel and the genocide in Gaza. When you ignore international law for one bad actor, then others feel empowered.
When it comes to Musk, this is merely a new example of failing to regulate billionaires and technology platforms in ways that serve the public interest and of cowing to US pressure. Supriya Dwivedi describes Canada’s “tepid” response in an opinion piece for the Toronto Star, and also says how:
Canada can’t claim to be a sovereign country, let alone a country that has its “elbows up,” if the only way our government can speak out against a social media platform that doubles as a CSAM generator and distributor is predicated on whether it risks offending the Trump administration.
The only way we can escape the boomerang is to firmly break the cycles of imperialism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism that continue to haunt the world. To fail to tackle these structures at their foundations is to consign the future to the horrors of renewed ethno-nationalism and disaster.
We must organize to build the collective power to break the cycle. As Marshall Ganz has argued, “Organizing is how an inclusive, interdependent, and united citizenry can transform the desire to achieve change into the power to create change.” We need that locally, provincially, nationally, and internationally.
I don’t know what the rest of this year will bring, but I do know that contributing what I can to that organizing will be one of my main priorities.
You noted that state violence historically targets racialized individuals. The federal data in Ottawa paints a stark picture regarding our prisons. The Correctional Investigator reports that Indigenous people now make up 32% of the federal inmate population. That number keeps rising even though they are only 5% of Canada. We see these reports tabled in Parliament every year. It confirms that the colonial structures you mentioned are still very active here.
Powerful framing through Arendt's lens. The boomerang metaphor captures something crucial about how exploitative systems eventually normalize practices that circle back to the metropole. I've noticed in my work tracking regulatory capture that platform capitalism specifcally accelerates this because it lets companies externalize harms globally while maintainng plausible deniability. The Musk CSAM situation is textbook - the infrastructure exists to moderate, but enforcement is selective based on profit calculus. When accountability mechanisms only apply to some actors, you're right that it greenlights further abrogation.