Imperial boomerang effect

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, spoke of how Adolf Hitler first tried his extermination tactics in Namibia, by starving the Herero people, and coralling them into concentration camps cordoned off with barbed wire. A strategy that started in the colonies was eventually imported into Europe. That's how the concentration camps came to Europe. And so it is: what happens out there in the imperium, comes back to haunt the metropolis. This is the imperial boomerang effect.

Sadly, we've learnt nothing from this sordid history, so here is Nesrine Malik to warn us that here we are again.

Reading her excellent article, I was reminded of Martin Niemoller's pertinent and urgent poem First They Came:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

We ignore the suffering of others, at the hands of tyrannical governments, at our peril. To quote Fannie Lou Hamer, "No one is free, until we're all free." The time to speak up is now.

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