Trump Is Not Righteous Retribution
Chris Hedges is wrong about Minneapolis and Alex Pretti.
In a recent Instagram post, lefty journalist Chris Hedges indulges in his standard boilerplate moralistic and apocalyptic rhetoric to explain our current predicament. He claims that we are experiencing an “imperial boomerang,” by which he means that the evil policies that have been deployed against colonized people abroad and at home are coming home to roost.
What’s happening in Minneapolis, Hedges says, would be familiar to people in Iraq invaded and brutalized by American troops, or to Black people in the US brutalized by American police. Then he reaches for the fire and brimstone.
Empires when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland…. But before we became victims of state terror we were accomplices; before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated and often celebrated the same gestapo tactics as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza is ready for us.
This rhetoric goes over well with a fair number of people (progressive and otherwise) who don’t necessarily identify as Christians but who nonetheless enjoy a good Bible thumping with lots of recrimination, guilt, and torment for sinners. The leftist sugar-coating shouldn’t fool you though; Hedges is celebrating the victory of the worst people on earth and blaming the victims for their suffering. This is fash propaganda with a new paint job. It’s intellectually and morally bankrupt, and it should be hooted down.
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The boomerang has always been here
The theory of imperial boomerang was originally developed by Aimé Césaire. Césaire was talking specifically about European colonialism; he argues that the techniques developed by Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and other colonial powers to control their colonies abroad were eventually used to subjugate and terrorize populations at home under the Nazis.
Whether or not this makes sense for Europe, it absolutely does not translate to the US, which was founded as a searingly violent slave state committed to the genocidal conquest of native peoples in its own expanding contiguous territory. It was only after this brutal domestic repression was accomplished that the US turned to colonial conquest abroad in places like the Philippines—and then the rest of the world.
It’s true that the US developed tactics and cruelty in imperial adventures abroad which it brought back home—police sergeant Jon Burge, for example, learned torture techniques in Vietnam which he later used to coerce confessions in Chicago. Those techniques were employed, though, against Black men—a group which has been marginalized, stigmatized, tortured, and murdered since the founding of the US. Burge’s racist violence isn’t really an example of imperial violence returning on its perpetrators; it’s an example of a fascist and racist state unleashing horrors at home and abroad in ways that build one on the other.
Hedges tries to make the boomerang theory fit by quietly amending Césaire and pretending he imperial boomerang theory applied to colonial violence abroad and to racist violence at home—to both the invasion of Iraq and mass incarceration. But Césaire doesn’t talk about an analogy to mass incarceration; he’s really thinking of violence committed in imperial contexts and imperial contexts alone. As a result, his theory doesn’t make a lot of sense in an American milieu where apartheid and mass racist violence were born with the state.
This racist violence didn’t return from abroad. But it was pervasive and therefore inevitably touched not just marginalized or colonized people, but those who stood with them or even near them.
White abolitionists were murdered when they spoke against slavery; white people in Kansas were murdered when they didn’t want to introduce slavery in the state; hundreds of thousands of white people in the Union army were killed when they refused to have slavery become the law of the entire union. White civil rights workers and white leftists were surveiled, harassed, beaten and killed by white supremacists in the 20th century and beyond; massive numbers of white people rot behind bars thanks to the prison industrial complex built by racism. But none of this is some sort of belated righteous retribution. It’s a long-term status quo.
Fascism is not a symptom of American decay
Hedges has to elide this history because he wants to tell a story of decadence and decay—of empires falling and society losing its moral moorings.
But can anyone look at the incredible resistance and solidarity in Minneapolis and conclude that some collective “we” has lost its moral way? Hedges mentions Alex Pretti, but only to say he was murdered; he doesn’t explain that Pretti was murdered because he was out on the street showing solidarity with immigrants and people of color targeted by ICE. Pretti did not become a victim of state terror because he was an accomplice in state terror; he became a victim of state terror because he was deliberately risking his life to stand against state terror. His collaboration with fascists didn’t lead to his death. His resistance to fascists did. It’s frankly repulsive to suggest otherwise.
Similarly, the genocide in Gaza was not embraced wholesale, without demure, by everyone in the US. Many students, of many backgrounds, protested. People spoke against Israeli atrocities and lost their jobs. Public opinion—especially Democratic public opinion—swung against Israel in an unprecedented turnaround.
Democratic leaders largely ignored this opinion shift and chose to collaborate in the repression of free speech at home. That handed the fascists a wedge and a victory which said fascist have capitalized on to justify an all-out ideological assault on higher education.
This could be seen as an example of imperial boomerang, in a way. But it’s notable that the imperial boomerang was picked up and hurled in part because Zionists were so shocked and terrified by the widespread rejection of what they see as colonial verities. Contra Hedges, violence was not the inevitable, just result of indifference and apathy at home. It was a response to courageous resistance and impassioned solidarity.
What Hedges fails to understand—and what I think Césaire may also have missed—is that fascism is not some inevitable evolutionary development of the dynamics of colonialism and capitalism. Fascism is an ideology of backlash. It is a dialectical reactionary response to left wing, progressive, and egalitarian movements—including, but not limited to, socialism, antiracism, feminism, and anticolonialism.
Hedges believes fascism is the result of imperial moral decay. But the truth is a lot more complicated. Fascism is the result of a growing resistance to empire and a powerful moral demand for justice in society—which is greeted by established hierarchies as an existential threat.
What is happening in Minnesota is not that people who refused to care about the marginalized and the colonized are getting what’s coming to them. What is happening is that people are refusing the logic of colonialism and putting their lives on the line for justice and for their neighbors. This is not a sign of decay; it’s not a sign of moral rot. It’s an inspiring example of the powerful US tradition of antiracism and solidarity—a tradition which the forces of fascism reliably answer with massive violence.
No fate
Hedges’ rhetoric is seductive because it feels both wise and empowering. He says he knows what is going to happen (doom!) and he positions himself with the righteous forces of destruction, enjoying the fascist misery which we all supposedly deserve. It’s a variation on Bill Paxton’s despairing cry of “Game Over!” in which he tries to escape the terror of the moment by leaping ahead in time and identifying with the power and inevitability of the xenomorphs.
But, as per another movie in the James Cameron canon, the future is not in fact written yet. Past choices and past actions have consequences, but so do present ones. More, colonial history is not the only American history, and the history of resistance—by Aimé Césaire, definitely, but also by many others, including, most recently Renee Good, and Alex Pretti—is also relevant and powerful.
No matter how wise or righteous it feels, if you find yourself saying, “Minneapolis deserves it” in any way, shape, or form, you are parroting fascist talking points and you should take a breath, log off, and reconsider your life choices. Because the meaning of Alex Pretti’s death is not that America is irredeemable and we should enjoy seeing it go up in flames. The meaning of his death is that America is what we make it, and that there are many people in Minneapolis, and not just in Minneapolis, who believe that solidarity can overcome fascism, at home and everywhere.
This may be one of your best essays. Thank you. I am so tired of the leftist doomers who add nothing to the conversation but their own insufferable brand of self-righteous defeatism.
He's wrong to suggest that this is a solely American imperialist policy. British soldiers who served in the overseas territories and then returned to be cops in London would have undergone the same transformative usages, as would French overseas soldiers serving as cops in Paris.