Five years after the Second World war and the Holocaust, French-Martinican author Aimé Césaire wrote this:

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, legitimized 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 civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950/ English translation, 1972)

With the term that is now referred to as the "imperial boomerang", he pointed out how the genocide in Europe, applied to its own populations, was a continuation of the colonial violence Europe itself had applied to the rest of the world. Concentration camps were invented by the British, and all European colonial powers were guilty of genocidal violence in some form. His book called Discourse on Colonialism is a long condemnation of the dehumanization at work in colonialism. Later writers, such as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Naomi Klein has echoed the term in their discussions of the Holocaust.

The main point is that the dehumanization necessary for colonialism to work was doomed to come back to Europe and poison what he called "European civilization". This is not through some mystical process, but through the simple fact that the colonial administrators returned to Europe to continue their careers. They had learned and applied an administrative logic in the colonies, built on racism and genocide. Faced with a revolting populace at home, the demands for democratic reforms and the working-class uprisings of the early 20th century, the colonial administrative response was to solve this with racist violence.

In the book he shows how racism was intrinsic to the intellectual and political discourse of Europe, not only in the speeches of Hitler and his kind, but in the mainstream discourse. Césare's claim is that Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust, neither can be understood nor discussed outside of this intellectual and political racism that was prevalent in all colonial countries. Condemning the racism and genocide of Hitler, while staying silent on the colonial precursors, is blatantly hypocritical.

Strikingly, he starts the lecture with these three lines:

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.

I can write a lot from these three lines, and while Césaire rails against the horrors of colonialism and its defenders of his time, the striking part is how well these lines also applies to the 70 years that have gone by since it's publication. There's a prophetic line later in the book that points to how:

The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

Because the rest of the 20th century was the heyday of American imperalism. And today, the imperial boomerang strikes back at the United States of America, in the form of Trump. Trump is the application of US foreign policy to the US.

To understand this, one must look at what US imperialism looked like. There's an oft memefied tweet to explain this very shortly:

The list of wars, coups, invasions and imperial violence of the US since 1945 is too long to even start here. And of course, the US is a built on genocidal settler colonialism and slavery, both of which are essential to explain the authoritarian politics we see today. But the focus in this text is US imperialism.

Unlike the earlier colonialism of Europe, the violence of US imperialism was mostly indirect. There were wars and invasions, and US didn't shy away from the application of force, but it mostly preferred to leave the actual rule of its territories to others who could rule in their place.

The US ruled trough others who could apply the necessary violence without dirtying American hands. The times when the US invaded other countries openly were few, and mostly failed, but with coups the US could install rulers with far less loss of American lives. The loss of life was still massive, but the application of violence to stifle dissent was the main rule of US imperialism. The US ruled its empire through brutal dictatorships, and whenever democracy became too much of threat to US business interests or geopolitical dominance, there was a coup.

An old Latin-American joke goes:

Q: Why has there never been a coup in the USA?

A: There's no US embassy there.

Until the 6th of January 2021, that is. It failed, but it was a deliberate coup attempt.

There's of course a lot of complexity to how Trump arose to power, but what he represents is the colonial dictator. Just as the countless US vassals of the 20th century, he is committed to protecting US business interests against any threat to their profits. While he does this, he is enriching himself at the expense of his own state, just as the US-backed dictators in Africa, Asia and Latin-America have done countless times, and still do.

Trump even shares the vulgar love of gold and glamour that the most heinous dictators had. The combination of outright corruption with fierce nationalism and attacks on "enemies of the nation", centered on a supposedly strongman leader bears all the hallmarks of a classic authoritarian dictatorship. The list goes on with outright lies in the face of overwhelming evidence to contrary, government agents that snatch people from the street in bright daylight before sending them to brutal prisons or now outright executions in the face of popular dissent, a willingness to undermine and break the laws to get their way, and a disrespect for democracy and institutions in general.

Trump fights against "terrorists" and "criminals", and even "narco-terrorists", while pardoning known drug lords and allowing his agents to operate as terrorists in violation of international law. The hypocrisy is a boomerang of the US support for "democracy and freedom", mimicking what countless authoritarians have done with US support in the last century and this one. But this time, it's not only black and brown people in the peripheries of the empire that bears the brunt of these lies and the violence that follows them, it's the US population itself. And the deadly violence is no longer contained to the racialized underclass, but applies to anyone who dares to protest.

Though, the violence and the vulgarity of Trumps dictatorship are only parts of the imperial boomerang. The defining part of US imperialism was ideological, and the application of this ideology on the imperial subjects. This was the true form of American imperialism, trough economic policy. The World Bank, the IMF and WTO were, despite lofty goals about development, set up to ensure that US business interests could secure profits around the world. With "structural adjustment", trade deals and investment treaties, the US made sure that states had to bow before the might of US investors. Any "unnecessary" and "wasteful" state institutions had to be cut, public services had to be privatized in the name of "efficiency" and regulations had to be eased to allow for "growth". From the laboratory of Pinochet's Chile, the US-installed dictator, this neoliberalism became part of the Pax Americana in the late 20th century and early 21st.

While this economic impetus always has been part of US national politics, it has also been held somewhat in check by the need for a functioning state apparatus in the imperial core. With DOGE, we got the farcical application of cuts in "unnecessary", "wasteful" and "inefficient" government institutions. The need for a functioning state is gone as the boomerang comes home.

What is gone now is the veneer of democracy in the imperial core. The US and its allies has always used its principles for trickery and deceit. The principles of free speech, elections and human rights were always contingent on the good will of the elite, even within the US and Europe. The liberal illusion, held by Democrats in the US and various liberal and social democratic parties elsewhere, that there could be fair elections, freedom of speech and human rights in the oligarchic state, has cracked. To quote Césare again:

I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. [...] At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciaton, there is Hitler.

Césare wrote about the imperial boomerang of Europe in the last century, for this century, there is Trump at the end of capitalism.

Capitalism, in its neoliberal "present stage", is incompatible with democracy and humanism. Because the main threat to US business interest in its imperial periphery was the population itself. The dictators were, and are, there to protect against this threat. Their demands for self-determination, democracy, dignity and life stood in the way of profits, and imperial violence and dehumanization became necessary.

Now it is no longer only the population in the imperial periphery that stands in the way of US businesses and their profits, it is also the populations of the imperial core. That's why the boomerang is now hitting the cities of US and the US allies in the "West". Democracy, human rights and dignity stand in the way of profit, as we cannot close our eyes to our civilization’s most crucial problems.

To oppose Trump, while defending Israel’s genocide or closing our eyes to the imperial violence of USA, is the hypocrisy that brings the boomerang down on us. That is whether we live in the US itself, or in one of the US-allied states that has supported this violence. We can see this with the boomerang hitting Europe with full force now, as Trump is unraveling NATO trough his threats about Greenland and trough his outright condemnation of democracy and human rights in Europe. As European nations failed to uphold democracy, human rights and even the basic value of human life outside of Europe (most recently in Palestine), we now face the same threat to our own hold on these things.

Still, this is not all bleak. Because, over and over again, the fascist dictators installed by US coups have been overthrown. Not by alliance of of military forces, as Hitler was, but by popular uprisings. And while no one can win over the US in a military conflict, a popular uprising supported through international solidarity has won over countless US-backed dictatorships, and can win again.