Beyond McCarthyism: the Imperial Boomerang and the Endless Present

There’s an ongoing argument I have with a friend whenever I express shock or outrage at the latest spasm of authoritarianism from the United States or from Westminster. She rebukes me for being nostalgic for bygone eras, which she reminds me were marked by state violence, systemic racism and war under previous regimes going back decades. She’s right, of course.

But some of the dark landscapes we find ourselves in today are genuinely new, unprecedented and terrifying. Some of this is the unforeseen consequences of technological advances that could have been liberating but have become tools of repression. Take, for example the facial recognition technology ‘Clearview’ developed by the Australian coder Hoan Ton-That, which is something straight out of dystopian sci-fi. Mother Jones magazine tells us that: “Thousands of newly obtained documents show that Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left. Now their digital dragnet is in the hands of the Trump administration.” (The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI). Or the use of what Ezra Klein has called the ‘memetic use of punishment’ – Trump’s flooding people’s timelines with video imagery of people being shackled and ‘rendered’ into gulags in El Salvador, or joking with El Salvador’s dictator Nayib Bukele, and repeatedly saying he was interested in sending U.S. citizens to Bukele’s mass prison camp. This is a new form of ‘sado populism’, soaked in violence and amplified through the technology of the mistakenly called ‘social’ media. See also the homeland security secretary Kristi Noem (aka Ice Barbie) atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona, in what’s being called ‘sadism-chic’.

One way to understand this ‘whether this is new’ debate is to recognise that what is being done to people in America, as it staggers into dictatorship, is the ‘imperial boomerang theory’. The term was first coined by the black intellectual, poet, and politician from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, Aimé Césaire, in his groundbreaking 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism. According to Césaire, colonisation dehumanized both the colonized and the colonizer. It taught imperial societies to rationalize cruelty and hierarchy, paving the way for fascism, totalitarianism, and domestic injustice within Europe itself.

As Connor Woodman writes: “the ‘imperial boomerang effect’ is a term for the way in which empires use their colonies as laboratories for methods of counter-insurgency, social control and repression, methods which can then be brought back to the imperial metropolis and deployed against the marginalised, subjugated and subaltern within. With weak moral and legal restrictions, empires are gifted a free hand to test new technologies and social hierarchies on colonised populations. Once honed, the circulation of personnel and knowledge through the empire spreads these repressive methods across colonies – and back into the domestic heartland.”

It is no surprise that the countries of the West which were most deeply committed to imperialism and colonial rule are the ones now turning on their own people.

The Disappeared

The practice of kidnapping completely innocent people off the streets, aided by the Peter Thiel-funded Clearview technology is now a well-known phenomenon and part of the outrage being expressed as Trump’s regime descends further into violence and chaos is that the state repression is now leaching out beyond the usual minorities into the middle classes, the campuses of Harvard and beyond. The people being snatched off the streets by vigilante groups are still, largely, people of colour and immigrants operating in the grey zone of citizenship and status. But the consequences of this tyranny is that we are asked to choose, yes these people should be sent to El Salvador, but no these people are ‘innocent’. In the court of public opinion (having suddenly replaced any due process) we have acquiesced to people being deported without notice, being ‘disappeared’.

Another phenomenon that is quite new is the extra-legal attacks on individuals expressing dissenting views on university campuses. The most high-profile case is Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate student of Columbia University in New York. Khalil, 30, is a Palestinian green card holder who was a leader during protests on campus last year. He was arrested in front of his pregnant wife and has been in a detention center in Louisiana since March. Others include Rümeysa Öztürk, who US immigration officials wearing masks and hoodies encircled and grabbed in a suburb of Boston and bundled her into an unmarked car. Öztürk is a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national on a visa, who had co-written an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts’ response to Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Palestinians. She was rushed into detention in Louisiana in defiance of a court order. Ozturk, 30, says she has been neglected and abused there in “unsafe and inhumane conditions”.

Khalil and Öztürk are just two of an estimated 1,300 international students from at least 200 colleges across the US who have had their “legal status changed” by the state department, including the revoking of visas, between mid-March and mid-April. Those of you who remember JD Vance’s recent lecture on ‘free-speech’ being under attack (referencing Scotland) might wonder at the grotesque hypocrisy, but the attacks on students are part of a wider assault on institutions of higher education they loathe, and are a key part of the fascist playbook.

Critical thinking is an abomination to the new US regime and they are now actively trying to defund Harvard and other higher education institutions, demand they abolish courses they don’t like and have threatened to block oversees students from enrolling. Donald Trump has now frozen $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard University after they refused to bend the knee to him. This is what fascism looks like. As some have noted however, it’s hard to describe how much of an own-goal it is to tell a university with a $53 billion endowment and a giant PR team that you want to destroy them. Harvard, it seems, is well connected. Who knew?

Last Friday the Trump administration sent a letter – from the aforementioned Kristi Noem – to the university outlining demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its relationship with the federal government amounting to up to $9 billion of research funding. These demands include “audits” of academic programs and departments, along with the viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff, and changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices.

Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the community: “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights” … “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

This attack on the most basic civil rights of the US is of course wildly unconstitutional, but is part of the wider narrative of hatred of ‘the metroplitan elites’ that we heard here and what MAGA perceives as ‘woke culture’. “The professors are the enemy” said the bold Vance. While they are desperate to stamp out any dissenting viewpoints and can’t stand critical thinking, they are also deeply threatened by historical research.

Hidden Histories and the Endless Present

It is an essential part of the new Nationalism, whether in the US or the UK, that the country’s mythical past must not be challenged or questioned. This is not just a question of whitewashing colonial shame but what George Orwell called the “endless present”:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present.” – George Orwell, 1984

None of this deletion of history is new. We’ve seen it here in Britain. In 2017 it was discovered that thousands of key documents and files had disappeared from the National Archives. It was telling that the thousands of government papers included papers concerning the role of the British Army in Northern Ireland, the Falklands war and the Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted the downfall of the first Labour government.

As historian of the British Empire and author of ‘Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya‘ Caroline Elkins discovered:

“The overarching takeaway is that the government itself was involved in a very highly choreographed, systematised process of destroying and removing documents so it could craft the official narrative that sits in these archives. I never in my wildest dreams imagined this level of detail. I imagined it more of a haphazard kind of process.”

As freelance journalist Siobhan Fenton writes (“Why do archive files on Britain’s colonial past keep going missing?“):

“Many Britons have grown up believing their homeland saved and civilised the world, while atrocities, genocide and human rights abuses often go unmentioned. Successive governments have failed to narrow this knowledge gap, whether by setting up truth commissions, establishing a museum of colonialism or teaching schoolchildren about colonialism as part of the standard curriculum.”

“The loss of these documents provides an apt metaphor for what colonialism means to many in Britain. Embarrassing facts are neatly filed away, labelled as “the past”, and on the rare occasions that the archives are inspected, damning evidence is nowhere to be seen.”

What is astonishing about the Trump regime’s assault on free speech and destruction of it’s own supposed democratic values and institutions, is the fact that it is doing this not against people who are criticising the USA – as in the past – but against those who are critical of another country altogether. Such is the power of the Israeli lobby within America, that the US will destroy and deface its own democracy to protect another regime.

As Saree Makdisi, the author of, among other books, Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial puts it: “As people across the nation look on, aghast, at the footage of vulnerable students of color being abducted in broad daylight by the masked gunmen of ICE, it’s important to acknowledge the unprecedented nature of what we’re living through.”

“This moment has been compared to McCarthyism. But the Red Scare was sold (however fraudulently) to the American people as a way to protect the country and its government from the threat of communist infiltration. The campaign of brute intimidation ravaging campuses across the country is not being framed as a way of safeguarding the American government or political system; it is, rather, intended to protect a distant foreign regime and to shield it from criticism in the country whose taxpayers are increasingly unwilling to finance its system of apartheid and its program of genocidal violence.”

“After all, not one of the students being pursued or detained today is accused of criticizing the United States or its system of government. Even now, in this gathering darkness, you can stand with a bullhorn in the middle of any American college campus, say what you want about Donald Trump or the American government, and not fear that you will be kidnapped by the state. Instead, what Trump’s targets are alleged to share is their criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and their advocacy of universally acknowledged Palestinian rights.”

Of course the other aspect of this dark period is the context of climate breakdown in which Trump’s regime lands. At what is arguably the most critical moment in human history, the new regime rails against any and all environmental regulations and is rumoured to be about to swoop on environmental organisations on Earth Day. The concerns are that the administration could attempt to target green groups by defining efforts to limit fossil fuel development as a threat to national security. That is where we are.

Bill McKibben, founder of 360.org writes: “The threat comes amidst the ongoing decimation of federally-funded climate science. In the last few days, for instance, NOAA has announced it will no longer be maintaining its remarkable map of sea-surface temperatures, while the NIH said it was no longer gathering information on the health impacts of global warming.”

Genocide and Space Tourism

In this sense Trump’s project of White Nationalism and Christian Zionism has a symmetry and Orwell’s “endless present” makes perfect sense. They are terrified of the past, but the “slow cancellation of the future” has been accelerated. So we are left with the grim and the absurd; Katy Perry and Co floating into space on Jeff Bezos’s rocket, looking like something between the Fantastic Four and a girl band, while down on earth rockets of a different kind rain down on Palestinians.

This grotesque moment settles into a daily rhythm of the endless present: Trump announcing tariffs, then cancelling them when the consequences are realised (and the insider trading completed); announcing a peace deal with Russia, then walking away; projecting a ridiculous solution to the war against Gaza, then abandoning it. Between starting to write this and finishing it, the Trump administration have announced that the letter to Harvard was a ‘mistake.’

There are continuities with the far-right of the past, but what we are experiencing is different. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write:

“If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.

Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.”

“Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of  dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.”

Contagious Delirium

This delirium is contagious, and this week saw Trump’s imitators, Reform UK polling to gain 278 seats in England and take control at Westminster. Is this too absurd?

In this new world, in this post-truth era, nothing is too ridiculous or obscene.

Britain’s version of the ‘endless present’ is to replay the themes and narratives of Brexit over and over and to re-fight the ‘culture wars’ ad nauseam as all of the tropes and memes of the American far-right play out with a politer British accent.

The danger of Reform UK in power is that they replicate the breakdown of the last vestiges of democracy we are witnessing in America. It would be absurd hubris to think that Britain has any stronger traditions and institutions of democracy to resist such a breakdown than our American cousins. Just look at the state broadcaster, the captured corporate media, the institutionally racist police force and the draconian legislation that is already in place. Just look at the whole narrative that loathes ‘Net Zero’ and the powerful clandestine networks and dark money that fuels and funds Farage and Badenoch and their movements. Just look at the events of last summer when widespread rioting endangered people housed in asylum centres and remember that not long ago it was government policy to send people to Rwanda. Looking across the Atlantic we can despair, but there is no room for complacency.

Finding Each Other

Like so many of the rolling crises that morph and converge, their timeline has changed. They are now, not on some future time horizon. Ezra Klein has said:

“The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists: a prison built for disappearance, a prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, a prison where the only way out, according to El Salvador’s justice minister, is in a coffin.”

Responses to these appalling developments vary. Some make great play of appealing to America’s legal system to protect individuals, and America’s fragile democracy. Others argue we should repair the ‘social fabric’ of society, and fight cruelty and sadism with kindness and community. Others think we should create an electoral popular front against the far-right.

The American writer J.P. Hill (There’s a Cell for You Too) urges against these responses: “We have to rethink everything” he says. “The law won’t save us.”

“We don’t have time to wait for elections in two years, or four years. We need mass resistance now. We need to shut it down now. We need international solidarity and movements that transcend borders, as the far-right does. It’s going to take all of us, it’s going to take actions and organizing that might have seemed unfathomable just months ago. It’s going to take shifting our understanding of the stakes, and of what fighting back looks like. We need to find each other, find organizations that are meaningfully resisting, that are building real power and are ready to truly disrupt business as usual, to really fight fascism.”

I think he’s right, here and there. These are unprecedented times and will require unprecedented responses.