First Published Countercurrents
As a sort of macabre postmortem on the Gaza genocide, the contradictions of rights coded into the post-colonial international order could at last be stated openly by the Imperial establishment at Davos with the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney describing the international rules-based order as an ‘useful fiction’ that prevailed as long it served the Imperial hegemony of the USA. As if to take the baton from Carney, since Davos the parliaments of the Western liberal orders have almost uniformly worked to deny any kind of legislative naming of the killing in Gaza whilst actively legislating to institute new forms of repression to contain solidarity with Palestine within their own social orders – often in violation of their rights.
This violation of civil liberties in the very centres of imperial power that parallels a greater violation of the colonised was described by Aime Cesaire, the poet of anti-colonial struggles, as the colonial boomerang. Cesaire introduced the boomerang theory in his Discourse on Colonialism to awaken European consciousness to the fact that the use of unbounded violence in the colony will find its way back; that fascism in the ’30s was the unrecognised return of methods tried on the colonised. We can read the boomerang as a dialectic (of rights) between parallel societies of a postcolonial international order, as a superstructure that hovers over us. The dialectic that mediates between the colonised (through the capacity to absorb Imperial violence?) and the colonising (through the capacity to advance liberty, democracy?).
Against the spectre of a coming multipolar world, it is this dialectic that must be asserted with a new project of Imperial renewal whose scale of violence requires its commensurate scale of repression in the liberal orders for which the Gaza genocide serves as a benchmark turning any involvement with Palestinian rights into a minefield of legal traps. It’s the process which by default leads to the situation in Britain whereby the most harmless of its citizens, old age pensioners, are now being arrested in the thousands using terrorism laws. The reality might be absurd but not illogical if we understand the dialectic at work.
But the dialectic is not done and demands far more work in a project that returns us to the methods of a naked colonialism stripped of its euphemisms using the language of pure domination and annihilation. Its violence has two faces:
Firstly, in its execution to produce our time of ‘fracture’ as Carney put it. It should be of no surprise that the state created by the mandate as an incomplete and ongoing project sponsored by the Imperial hegemon is its protagonist. That is its purpose, a ‘loyal Ulster in a hostile sea’ as the British had imagined it.
Secondly, the European states who as defacto subsidiaries of the US hegemony serve in the supply chain of means used in the Gaza. As old colonial powers from mandate times, though not direct protagonists, they have a historic right to the spoils through their capacity to accommodate and legitimate the violence. Thus when Cesaire in his discourse suggested that “the barbarism of the United States” would surpass “the barbarism of Western Europe”, he no doubt meant this complementarity that fulfils itself through the work the nation or state or political party does for its maintenance.
Britain’s role in this is critical through the inheritance of its colonial institutions, in particular the Crown Jewels of its global banking twinned with Wall Street that provide the financial lifeblood for Imperial adventurism. This alongside the assets of its colonial retentions some in violation of international law like Diego Garcia and some increasingly contentious like RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. Akrotiri from where throughout the Gaza genocide, British aeroplanes conducted a record number of surveillance flights supposedly “in search for hostages” in the same time as thousands of civilian infrastructures were destroyed in contravention of international law, the same time as over 20,000 children were killed in Gaza. Never has a theatre of live genocide been so uniquely documented.
This perversity as we are being overwhelmed by the transparency of imperial violence through social media, tells us much on the use of this complementarity in a process by which not only a genocidal scale of killing can be subsumed into liberal morality but further to convert that into Imperial gain. More than anyone, Britain has historic capacity for this work. Once we understand its value to the Imperial project, we can read through Keir Starmer, Britain’s Prime Minister, in the understated managerialism he represents, the work of a deeper real subsumption (to use the Marxist analogy) of colonial violence into liberal morality. This is what I mean by the management of the boomerang of genocide. Rather than address the genocide through a restoration of rights taken from Palestinians by Imperial powers, the tools of parliament are used to subject every form solidarity with Palestine to some kind of regulatory legislation or policing measure.
Britain of course is not alone in this enterprise. In Australia, Queensland outlaws the slogans of Palestinian resistance with a sweeping ‘Criminals Amendment Bill’; in France, the Caroline Yadan Bill the most ambitious reset of language restricting solidarity with Palestine by criminalising the naming of what oppresses them. The project is neutralise through law the very idea of Palestinian resistance that follows the project to neutralise Palestinian resistance through genocide.
If we recall the scramble for territory by European states at the end of the nineteenth century, the scramble now in the twenty-first is for legislation to ban language of colonial resistance. That is how the boomerang turns the stage of Imperialism. The tools of liberal order turns on its own citizenry. Which is how a post-Gaza Britain comes to potentially produce 3000 native ‘terrorists’ through legislation in one calendar year.
