The Imperial Boomerang Lands in Los Angeles
As police and the National Guard escalate against anti-ICE protesters, the Department of Homeland Security bridges US violence abroad and US violence at home.
The best analysis of the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles comes from a poet and politician who died in 2008.
Aimé Césaire's seminal 1950 Discourse on Colonialism sought to make sense of a West emerging from the spectacular violence of Nazi Germany with certain convenient amnesias. Hailing from the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, Césaire found it risible that a shattered Europe did not – or, more accurately, would not – connect Nazi atrocities to those that the great European powers committed against the native populations of their claimed overseas possessions.
"[B]efore they were [Nazism's] victims, they were its accomplices," Césaire wrote. “[T]hey tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them… they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples." Césaire called this a "terrific boomerang effect." With some refinement, his concept is now known as the "Imperial Boomerang."
Césaire would definitely have recognized the Imperial Boomerang landing on the streets of Los Angeles. In the viral videos of chipped concrete raining on police cars from overpasses, Césaire would have seen the lineage of Palestinian stones thrown at Western-backed Israeli occupying forces, or even trash thrown by Kurds in Syria furious at the retreating US forces that left them to their fate from Turkish invaders in 2019. In the arrival of Black Hawk helicopters, mass surveillance tools, and the federalized California National Guard to LA, Césaire would have seen the fingerprints of the so-called US ‘War on Terror.’ As this piece was being edited, CNN reported that a battalion-sized force of 700 Marines would soon arrive in Los Angeles as if it was Fallujah.
And in the inciting event of ICE officers in bulletproof vests snatching unarmed laborers from a Home Depot parking lot – strange how their employers tend not to get arrested, huh? – Césaire would have seen not only the arbitrary detentions that are central features of military occupations, but the vengeful persecution of Western governments against the arrival of migrants from the countries those Western militaries destabilize.
Were Césaire alive to conduct a structural analysis of the advancing militarization of American law enforcement since 9/11, I suspect he would have understood the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a template for how Imperial Boomerangs operate in the 21st century.
Created by President George W. Bush under now-forgotten pressure from the Democratic Party in 2002, DHS did more than combine immigration enforcement, border militarization, and counterterrorism.