Spring 2025

*AI generated watercolor of armored children eating burgers at the White House on the 4th of July.*

Millions of people, particularly liberals, are shocked by the rapid dismantling of rights in just the first few months of the second Trump administration. But the probability of this dismantling was actually predicted 75 years ago by Aimé Césaire, poet, author, and statesman from the French-colonized Caribbean island of Martinique. In his powerful essay Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire theorized that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories and plunder resources abroad will eventually use those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.

Ignoring, legitimizing, and tolerating the US government's violence against people abroad, until it happened to Europeans and people of European descent, was always going to have repercussions at home.

As we see today, the boomerangs are beginning to come back, starting with mass surveillance, suppression of free speech, detainment without charge, and militarized policing.

Centuries of Outgoing Boomerangs

Millions of us have watched Israel's horrific genocide of Gaza on our phones over the past 17 months, shocked that every American isn't in the streets demanding an end to the mass murder of civilians. But Americans have been ignoring civilian deaths abroad for centuries. It is normalized to the extent that “war is war” is a common dismissal when anyone raises concerns. Supposed threats to “National Security”, “Freedom”, and “Democracy” are other catchphrases of the war machine deployed to inhibit any thought or protest on the matter.

In the 20th century alone, the FDR administration firebombed Tokyo in May 1945, killing an estimated 100,000 people. Months later, Harry Truman ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, indiscriminately murdering an additional 246,000 Japanese civilians. From 1950-53, US involvement in the Korean War resulted in the killing of 2-3 million civilians. Multiple US presidents oversaw the massacre of two million Vietnamese from 1962-1973, and the aftereffects of these wars and their chemical weapons caused generations of birth defects, PTSD, and abject poverty. The US-funded, "anti-communist" civil wars in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador from the late 1970's to early 1990s killed well over 300,000 civilians, mostly poor farmers.

In the 21st century, the Bush/Cheney administration, under the pretext of retribution for 9/11, committed violent invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, killing over half a million civilians, destroying homes, mosques, schools, churches, and turning millions of people into refugees, forced to flee their demolished homelands, despite absolutely no evidence of their involvement. Many of those refugees have not been able to return.

The Obama administration's 2011 intervention in Libya, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - ostensibly to protect the Libyan people - resulted in the deaths of between 15,000-30,000 of them and left behind a dangerous power vacuum. During Israel's "Operation Protective Edge" in 2014, in which they massacred 2,251 Palestinians in Gaza, President Obama "asked Israel to do more about civilian casualties” - while continuing to provide the weapons used to kill them.

From October 2023 through January 2025, the Biden/Harris administration claimed (publicly) to have demanded the same, while bypassing Congress multiple times to supply Israel with the weapons used to commit its ongoing genocide of Palestine.

Republican and Democratic presidents have provided weapons and political cover for Israel's massacres of Palestinians since the forced displacement and Occupation of Palestine in 1948, with nearly no response from the American people - until a boomerang came back to the occupiers on October 7, 2023.

So how have Americans allowed these atrocities to happen around the world at the hand of their own government, throughout their entire lives? How were the American people convinced, for centuries, that civilians (mostly Black and Brown) had to be murdered en masse to ensure our safety?

Indoctrinated Fear

Generation after generation, manufactured fear of others has been used to sustain public support for American hegemony.

For Americans who grew up in the 1950s, it began with a deep fear of others indoctrinated post-WWII. Following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, every Japanese American was viewed as a threat. Racism and government-stoked paranoia against Japanese Americans ensued, and FDR issued an Executive Order that put nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. From 1942-1946, the collective punishment of an innocent population was either accepted or ignored by the majority of the American public.

During The Cold War (1947-1991), the US government kept Americans in a constant state of panic about a pending Soviet attack. Publicly claiming its objectives to curtail communism, prevent the expansion of Soviet influence, and keep Americans safe, the Cold War was really a drawn-out power struggle between the two emerging superpowers.

From 1950 to 1954, the Red Scare ramped up fears about alleged Communists inside the US government, creating a climate of fear and suspicion within the nation. September 11, 2001 incited a widespread fear of Muslims across the country, resulting in social isolation, verbal, and even physical assaults on American Muslims. This stereotype-fueled fear allowed the US government to pass the Patriot Act, which granted law enforcement expanded surveillance powers to spy on innocent populations.

Mainstream Media Tells Us Who The Enemy Is

America's Baby Boomer generation grew up watching the nightly news on just three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. News anchors in the 1950's-1970's simply read the news of the day and were trusted as reliable sources of information. Walter Cronkite, who anchored the CBS Evening News from 1962-1981, was called "the most trusted man in America", closing his broadcasts with the tagline, "And that's the way it is."

The launches of CNN (1980), MSNBC and FOX News (1996) changed that entirely. Cable news networks framed the news to benefit their corporate sponsors and political bases. After 9/11, news media pushed the US government's claim that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction" to justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq, the hunt for Bin Laden to justify war in Afghanistan, and the protection of "national security interests" to justify increased measures of surveillance and data collection in their "war on terror".

Both news and entertainment media have spent decades framing Muslims as enemies of the US, portraying them as terrorists in news broadcasts, television and films. Yet in reality, the US has actually been the aggressor, bombing 14 Muslim countries since 1980 alone: Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria. The media's constant drumbeat to "stop terrorism" is really a cover for the US to violently steal other countries' natural resources, specifically oil and natural gas from the Middle East.

Mainstream media has parroted US government talking points to justify violence against Palestinians for decades. Cable news consistently frames Israelis as the victims and Palestinians as the aggressors, ignoring the 75 years of brutal occupation that Palestinians endured under Israel leading up to October 7, 2023. FOX News and right-wing radio back Israel, America's military base in the Arab world, but right alongside them are MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times, whose reporters were described as "stenographers for the IDF" in 2018, five years before the current genocide.

Presidents and press secretaries of both parties spin lies from the podium, especially regarding war. While Biden, Harris, and other Democrats assured the public that they were "working tirelessly toward a ceasefire" between Israel and Hamas, the Biden/Harris administration provided $23 billion in weapons to Israel, which used them to massacre nearly 200,000 Palestinians, destroy 90% of homes in Gaza, bomb every hospital, target ambulance drivers, doctors, teachers, journalists, civil service workers, refugee camps, and tents full of displaced people. Under the guise of a pier built to deliver humanitarian supplies, "Biden even sent US troops to support a covert massacre that killed over 200 Palestinians while retrieving Israeli hostages, in direct contravention of the diplomatic ceasefire exchanges Biden has purported to support."

An animated summary of “Manufacturing Consent”

College Protests and the Boomerang of Blame

Some of the first domestic victims of America’s imperialism are college protesters who are actually trying to stop the boomerangs going OUT.

In 2024, college students protesting the ongoing genocide of Palestine and calling for their universities' divestment from weapons manufacturers were met with tear gas-throwing police in riot gear. While their 1960s and 1970s counterparts were accused of being communist sympathizers, today's students are accused of standing with terrorists. Yet college protests have always been on the right side of history. "From the Vietnam War and civil rights movements in the 1960s to the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s and Black Lives Matter in 2020, these efforts sought to tackle the role of U.S. institutions and government in perpetuating injustices."

These college students, and millions of progressives across the country, begged Democrats to use their leverage to demand an end to the genocide as a precondition for their votes. But liberals, especially white Boomers, were more upset about the noise of protests, the inconvenience of blocked traffic, and Jewish students "feeling unsafe" walking by (safe) college encampments than they were about what they were protesting. "What if someone has to get to the hospital", they would cry from their armchairs, about a street protest against blowing up hospitals in Gaza.

Democrats' blame of progressives for Trump's election, while turning a blind eye to Netanyahu (the Trump of Israel) and his far right government's massacre of civilians, is the height of hypocrisy, entitlement, and honestly, white supremacy, which they claim to abhor. Telling progressives that it's okay to overlook genocide because "something might happen to ME" if Trump is elected, is neither the high road nor the right side of history. It's a callous disregard for the rest of the world.

Because what they worry about happening to them has been happening to others, at the hand of their own government, for centuries. Their silent complicity allowed the administration of their Democratic president to massacre Palestinians, not for their safety, but for their government's own strategic interests in the Middle East. They chose to watch cable news networks that ignored it, like the grandmother in The Zone of Interest, who was okay with what was happening at Auschwitz - as long as she didn't have to see or hear it.

A Glimmer of Hope

Millennials and Gen Z, who grew up with access to the internet and therefore voices from all over the world, cannot be spun by mainstream media. They know that America's imperial violence has brought us to this point, and while liberals bemoan the loss of the status quo that has protected them, despite its cost to millions of others, progressives are putting their lives on the line to stop that imperial violence every day, not just once every four years. Marching in the streets demanding an end to the genocide, chaining themselves to weapons manufacturers, and pushing for an end to arms sales to Israel, they know that the only way to prevent the Imperial boomerang from coming in is to stop the ones going out. Imagine the world we could live in if instead of disparaging them, everyone had the courage to join them.

About the Author

Lori studied abroad in Occupied Palestine during the first Intifada in 1989, and has worked in post-disaster relief and development around the world. She has 20 years of experience writing for both domestic and international nonprofit organizations.

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The Imperial Boomerang