Also known as “Foucault’s boomerang” or the “imperial boomerang”.
Image is of a sniper on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana State University, overlooking a student protest.
The Imperial Boomerang is the observation that the tactics of mass oppression and totalitarianism used by Western countries in their colonies and neocolonies will, sooner or later, return home to be used against the citizens of those Western countries. While the people living at the time of WW2 were, rightfully, in deep shock of the concentration camps used by Nazi Germany, those paying attention to what was occurring in Africa would not have been terribly surprised. Concentration camps were used in several countries in order to separate out ethnic groups and place them in more easily controlled environments which aimed to prevent them from rising up and fighting back against the Western governments which exploited them. There is the additional factor of governments taking notes from each other - Hitler was inspired by America’s racial segregation and genocide of indigenous groups, which author Carroll Kakel among others have written books on.
Today, the totalitarian strategies used by the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine are being brought home to Western countries as the American Reich and its global influence accelerate in their decline. Gaza was and is a cyber-concentration camp, with digital surveillance taking place alongside old-fashioned techniques of paying informants. Aside from being an unsinkable aircraft carrier and disrupting the entire Middle East, Israel’s primary role appears to be to generate new ways to monitor entire populations. Propaganda about China being an authoritarian police state with social credit scores and AI which knows where everybody is at all times was probably created, at least in part, to deflect attention from Israel doing those exact things. The paranoid and flimsy American regime with its gerontocratic upper circles now use these tactics at home: cracking down on any and all protestors with political views left of Mussolini; placing snipers on roofs ready to fire at the slightest provocation; and arresting organization leaders. Pegasus has wormed its way around the world, with a notable recent example in Poland, in which the previous conservative government used the spyware to monitor the current liberal ruling party. The Israeli military, experts only in killing children and not actual warfare, have trained the police of other nations.
It would be easy to end the preamble there, on a gloomy note about the brick wall - or, indeed, iron curtain - that upstart left-wing groups are up against. What history has shown is that these regimes are, in fact, beatable. Liberation movements around the world have found ways to counter imperialism, even if they required wars in which millions of their countrymen were murdered. The legacy of Israeli propaganda psyops and digital tracking is not victory, as Hamas demonstrated on October 7th and continues to show with every ambush executed and every Merkava destroyed. The legacy of Western military defence equipment is not success, demonstrated by every missile fired by Hezbollah and Iran which hits Israel. The legacy of the American Navy is not competence, with a naval blockade of the Red Sea still maintained after months by one of the poorest countries on the planet.
The protests of at least the last couple decades have been marked by failure to produce material results: from those against the Iraq War, to Occupy Wall Street, to the BLM protests of 2020. Of course, it would be silly to tell American protestors to start digging tunnels. But sooner or later, the failure of Western protest movements will be overcome, and a more effective strategy will be devised, in order to deflect the boomerang.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is the United States! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
The following is a comment left by user Emma under the Naked Capitalism story about Türkiye cutting off trade to Israel. Sharing it because it makes me hopeful, and I think we all appreciate having some hope:
This has basically been my viewpoint for months now. And honestly, if the Resistance can effectively extend the blockade to the Meditterranean, then I think there’s a solid chance that Israel as we currently know it will cease to exist by the end of this year. The road transport route isn’t going to be able to replace naval shipping, and airlift campaigns are, despite what propaganda schools tell us about 1948 Berlin, not capable of supplying entire populations. Not only that, but Israeli society can be paralyzed by relatively few strikes on offshore gas and various power stations and desalination plants, and Hezbollah retains the capability to perform these strikes without even needing to invoke Iran directly. Israel is completely stuck. They cannot give up, or the entire core point of their ideology - providing a safe space for the Zionist ubermensch - is forever destroyed, and the ideology will crumble around it. They also cannot escalate, or they will be physically destroyed. They are now world pariahs for everybody who isn’t a rabid, frothing, fascist dog which gets shaky with withdrawals if they don’t see some mutiliated child corpses every 12 hours (which still constitutes like half a billion people in the West but alas). Being a pariah can be mended over time with some dedicated propaganda campaigns but I don’t think Israel has that long.
The Israeli intelligence agencies can bleat all day long about how Hezbollah must be destroyed, or how Hamas is burrowing under American campuses; people cannot eat or drink ideology.
We’re all shocked at the psychotic rage displayed by so many people in Israeli leadership (like their UN rep talking about how college kids protesting are actually Hamas). On some level that was always there, sure. But I think what we are seeing now in all levels of Israeli society is something new. It’s like a society-wide mass psychosis. What they are displaying is not normal behavior and is beyond just fascism. I was in college when 9/11 happened. In the immediate aftermath, yeah some people expressed some bravado “let’s turn the Middle East into glass” attitudes but that was extremely rare. I think the social fabric of Israeli society is ripping apart, and in the grand scheme of things Oct 7 was basically a paper cut. The Israelis are out of their goddamn minds and I don’t see how bringing the current genocide to a conclusion will change that.
Now contrast that with the social fabric of the Palestinian people. I cannot imagine what it is like to live in Gaza right now. The Gazans who survive will be scarred for life, no doubt, both physically and mentally. And yet, all I see are attitudes of hope and defiance. They are living through hell on earth, and in the face of it all they are expressing a strength and revolve that is almost super human.
So take those two different mental states, and tell which society you have more hope for in the long run?
The amount of times I have seen these people mock dead children is horrifying. And not just on those telegram channels, pretty much any medium with a comment section that shows suffering from Gaza will attract a handful of these people saying the most disgusting things. That, or they’ll claim it’s fake when it clearly couldn’t be, or even worse that the parents are mutilating their own children just to make “Jews look bad”.
These types of images existed during Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit not in nearly the same volume. When CNN had a comments section, I can’t remember a time when Americans were saying things like that to footage of dead and dying children, on the rare occasion we’d see it.
They will also do some of the most insane mental gymnastics to justify war crimes. When the Julian Assange leaks came out, or stories of weddings being droned, Americans might have said something about “bad apples” or “honest mistakes”.
I got into an argument with some Hasbot over a video of an older male civilization being killed. They claimed that the soldier murdering the civilian lost family on Oct 7. When I asked the soldier’s name and the name of the family member lost, since such records exist, the response was literally “Well I don’t know for sure the soldier lost family on Oct 7, but he could have, why don’t you have any empathy for him?” They literally conceive of killing non combatants in cold blood the same way you might think of punching a wall when angry.
God I hope this comes to pass
lefty copium tbh, china under xi has never shown any predilection for foreign policy that does good things at the expense of pissing off the US as much as this would
Death to America
China might not get in involved, but Russia 100% will.
The war time economy has been too good for them NOT to flood Syria and West Africa with weapons