January 15, 2026 at 2:56 AM
Unsure about who the actual source for the quote is, possibly Aimé Césaire?
January 15, 2026 at 11:56 AM
Unsure about who the actual source for the quote is, possibly Aimé Césaire?
Time to re-read Aimé Cesaire and the Imperial boomerang thesis.
hard to understate how much of a disaster the entire post-9/11 government restructuring was. creation of dhs an absolute nightmare.
January 8, 2026 at 4:10 PM
Time to re-read Aimé Cesaire and the Imperial boomerang thesis.
A quote by Aime Cesaire that truly reminds me of today.
"People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism…1/3
"People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism…1/3
January 11, 2026 at 8:27 PM
A quote by Aime Cesaire that truly reminds me of today.
"People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism…1/3
"People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism…1/3
Cuando pisoteamos hipócritamente los derechos humanos y el derecho internacional porque aquí lo importante no son las víctimas, sino los asesinos, al final se nos puede volver en contra y toca llorar lo que no supimos defender.
'Discurso sobre el colonialismo', Aimé Césaire
'Discurso sobre el colonialismo', Aimé Césaire
January 13, 2026 at 9:27 PM
Cuando pisoteamos hipócritamente los derechos humanos y el derecho internacional porque aquí lo importante no son las víctimas, sino los asesinos, al final se nos puede volver en contra y toca llorar lo que no supimos defender.
'Discurso sobre el colonialismo', Aimé Césaire
'Discurso sobre el colonialismo', Aimé Césaire
Dazu kommt noch was: während Arendt und Césaire von der modernen Kolonisierung des 19. Jahrhunderts ausgehen, spricht bspw. Enrique Dussel die untrennbare Dialektik von Moderne und Kolonialismus an, die sich bereits seit 1492 beobachten lässt.
Es lohnt in diesem Kontext aber auch was in der Kritik an Foucault öfters mal aufschien zu erwähnen: die brutalen Polizei- und Unterdrückungstechniken, die in den Kolonien angewandt wurden, waren Exporte aus Europa.
Wenn wir seit Jahren vor dem „imperial boomerang“ warnen, dann warnen wir genau davor:
Durch den Westen politisch legitimierte Praktiken der Unterdrückung und dauerfinanzierte Strukturen der Gewalt im Ausland kommen unweigerlich zu uns zurück:
Ocupied territory. Hostile occupying force.
Durch den Westen politisch legitimierte Praktiken der Unterdrückung und dauerfinanzierte Strukturen der Gewalt im Ausland kommen unweigerlich zu uns zurück:
Ocupied territory. Hostile occupying force.
January 11, 2026 at 11:52 AM
Dazu kommt noch was: während Arendt und Césaire von der modernen Kolonisierung des 19. Jahrhunderts ausgehen, spricht bspw. Enrique Dussel die untrennbare Dialektik von Moderne und Kolonialismus an, die sich bereits seit 1492 beobachten lässt.
I truly love Aimé Césaire. I grew up on the same island he did and his words have always guided me.
January 11, 2026 at 8:30 PM
I truly love Aimé Césaire. I grew up on the same island he did and his words have always guided me.
"And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect… it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack."— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)
ICE Agent Who Shot Renee Nicole Good Identified as Jonathan Ross
Identifying the shooter in Minneapolis, The Intercept found a photo captioned “Jon Ross in Iraq” posted by a man noted in public records as his father.
theintercept.com
January 8, 2026 at 8:07 PM
"And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect… it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack."— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)
Register now for our 2026 CLACS Caribbean Seminars, @ilcs.bsky.social / @soccaribbeanuk.bsky.social
🗓️ Aimé Césaire & Derek Walcott Discussion
🗓️ Cricket, Caribbean Migration & Postwar England
🗓️ Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...
🗓️ Aimé Césaire & Derek Walcott Discussion
🗓️ Cricket, Caribbean Migration & Postwar England
🗓️ Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...
Caribbean Studies Seminar
ilcs.sas.ac.uk
January 10, 2026 at 6:19 PM
Register now for our 2026 CLACS Caribbean Seminars, @ilcs.bsky.social / @soccaribbeanuk.bsky.social
🗓️ Aimé Césaire & Derek Walcott Discussion
🗓️ Cricket, Caribbean Migration & Postwar England
🗓️ Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...
🗓️ Aimé Césaire & Derek Walcott Discussion
🗓️ Cricket, Caribbean Migration & Postwar England
🗓️ Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...
Right answer: Training. Israeli training specifically is pretty common in US law enforcement, afaik. About that imperial boomerang Césaire talked about…
Wrong answer: Supplier of falafel for the whole of US federal law enforcement.
Wrong answer: Supplier of falafel for the whole of US federal law enforcement.
January 10, 2026 at 4:52 PM
Right answer: Training. Israeli training specifically is pretty common in US law enforcement, afaik. About that imperial boomerang Césaire talked about…
Wrong answer: Supplier of falafel for the whole of US federal law enforcement.
Wrong answer: Supplier of falafel for the whole of US federal law enforcement.
Was exposed to this concept during my existential philosophy course. My teacher attributed a quote to Aimé Césaire which I cannot find explicitly though it does synthesize Césaire's thoughts.
"Fascism is colonialism come home."
"Fascism is colonialism come home."
Imperial boomerang - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
January 12, 2026 at 11:31 PM
Was exposed to this concept during my existential philosophy course. My teacher attributed a quote to Aimé Césaire which I cannot find explicitly though it does synthesize Césaire's thoughts.
"Fascism is colonialism come home."
"Fascism is colonialism come home."
quem defende isso é o aimé césaire, eu só concordo com ele. concordo demais.
January 8, 2026 at 3:01 AM
quem defende isso é o aimé césaire, eu só concordo com ele. concordo demais.
Each fresh horror unleashed brings me back to Aimé Césaire. “That they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
January 7, 2026 at 11:08 PM
Each fresh horror unleashed brings me back to Aimé Césaire. “That they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
A page out of @mark-bray.bsky.social’s Antifa: The Anti-fascist Handbook.
![INTRODUCTION
xvii
Finally, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-fascism has always been just one facet of a larger struggle against white supremacy and authoritarianism. In his legendary 1950 essay "Discourse on Colonialism," the Martiniquan writer and theorist Aimé Césaire argued convincingly that
"Hitlerism" was abhorrent to Europeans because of its "hu-miliation of the white man, and the fact that [Hitler] applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'niggers' of Africa." Without in any way diminishing the horror of the Holocaust, to a certain extent we can understand Nazism as European colonialism and imperialism brought home. The decimation of the indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia, the tens of millions who died of famine in India under British rule, the ten million killed by Belgian king Leopold's Congo Free State, and the horrors of transatlantic slavery are but a sliver of the mass death and societal decimation wrought by European powers prior to the rise of Hitler. Early concentration camps (known as "reservations") were set up by the American government to imprison indigenous populations, by the Spanish monarchy to contain Cuban revolutionaries in the 1890s, and by the British during the Boer War at the turn of the century. Well before the Holocaust, the German government had committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people of southwest Africa through the use of concentration camps and other methods between 1904 and 1907.4
For this reason, it is vital to understand anti-fascism as a solitary component of a larger legacy of resistance to white supremacy in all its forms. My focus on militant anti-fascism is in no way intended to minimize the importance of other forms of antiracist organizing that identify with anti-imperialism, black nationalism, or other traditions. (…)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ckhgxna3isqjqtvegqu3wkoi/bafkreias6vcijtorn3hwjcqk3hhpoiygzc7tnkrsrjpzl4hrl343kgkr3m@jpeg)
January 11, 2026 at 9:24 PM
A page out of @mark-bray.bsky.social’s Antifa: The Anti-fascist Handbook.
Such a cool thread.
I've seen "eia" in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire.
…
Eia pour le Kaïlcédrat royal!
Eia pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien inventé
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien exploré
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien dompté
…
I've seen "eia" in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire.
…
Eia pour le Kaïlcédrat royal!
Eia pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien inventé
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien exploré
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien dompté
…
Translation of this excerpt of "Notebook of a Return to My Native Land: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" by Aimé Césaire is from Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard.
January 9, 2026 at 10:54 PM
Such a cool thread.
I've seen "eia" in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire.
…
Eia pour le Kaïlcédrat royal!
Eia pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien inventé
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien exploré
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien dompté
…
I've seen "eia" in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire.
…
Eia pour le Kaïlcédrat royal!
Eia pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien inventé
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien exploré
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien dompté
…
You know who compared colonialism to the Holocaut? Aimee Cesaire.
It was he who talked about how the gold extracted in Latin America after the death of millions of people were again the symbol of another imperial endeavour, Nazi Germany, this time on Europe itself.
You just don't care, dude.
It was he who talked about how the gold extracted in Latin America after the death of millions of people were again the symbol of another imperial endeavour, Nazi Germany, this time on Europe itself.
You just don't care, dude.
January 4, 2026 at 6:35 PM
You know who compared colonialism to the Holocaut? Aimee Cesaire.
It was he who talked about how the gold extracted in Latin America after the death of millions of people were again the symbol of another imperial endeavour, Nazi Germany, this time on Europe itself.
You just don't care, dude.
It was he who talked about how the gold extracted in Latin America after the death of millions of people were again the symbol of another imperial endeavour, Nazi Germany, this time on Europe itself.
You just don't care, dude.
I've decided to revise my syllabus so that my spring world lit class gets both Cesaire and Galeano. Hope they still let me be a professor next fall.
January 4, 2026 at 10:39 PM
I've decided to revise my syllabus so that my spring world lit class gets both Cesaire and Galeano. Hope they still let me be a professor next fall.
Césaire evokes the “prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve” in modern life.
nacla.org/boomerangs-o...
Reading kingsnorth
nacla.org/boomerangs-o...
Reading kingsnorth
January 4, 2026 at 11:58 PM
Césaire evokes the “prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve” in modern life.
nacla.org/boomerangs-o...
Reading kingsnorth
nacla.org/boomerangs-o...
Reading kingsnorth
This is not the first US imperial atrocity for oil —let’s not exceptionalize it— but wow is is it awful. And the violation of Venezuelans domestically in the name of a sovereign borders they actually dgaf about.
As Aimee Cesaire put it— the price of imperialism is the empire’s own civilization.
As Aimee Cesaire put it— the price of imperialism is the empire’s own civilization.
January 3, 2026 at 12:23 PM
This is not the first US imperial atrocity for oil —let’s not exceptionalize it— but wow is is it awful. And the violation of Venezuelans domestically in the name of a sovereign borders they actually dgaf about.
As Aimee Cesaire put it— the price of imperialism is the empire’s own civilization.
As Aimee Cesaire put it— the price of imperialism is the empire’s own civilization.
Aimé Césaire on the imperial boomerang
YouTube video by How the Red was Won
youtu.be
January 3, 2026 at 6:12 PM
Thought of Cesaire too, this act feels different in that it shows how the US itself is coming into its own as an unapologetically authoritarian regime itself
This is not the first US imperial atrocity for oil —let’s not exceptionalize it— but wow is is it awful. And the violation of Venezuelans domestically in the name of a sovereign borders they actually dgaf about.
As Aimee Cesaire put it— the price of imperialism is the empire’s own civilization.
As Aimee Cesaire put it— the price of imperialism is the empire’s own civilization.
January 3, 2026 at 12:36 PM
Thought of Cesaire too, this act feels different in that it shows how the US itself is coming into its own as an unapologetically authoritarian regime itself
This from @wihorne.bsky.social in July 2022 couldn’t be more on point and prescient for rn.
drwilliamhorne.substack.com/p/what-is-fa...
drwilliamhorne.substack.com/p/what-is-fa...
![A little more than seventy years ago, the renowned Black intellectual and anti-colonial agitator Aimé Césaire observed that the horrors of fascism were nothing more than an application of colonialism on Europeans. “Before they were its victims,” he wrote, Europeans “were its accomplices… they shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples… they have cultivated that Nazism, [and] they are responsible for it.” Césaire’s analysis of fascism offered readers a withering indictment of “the barbarism of Western Europe” in Discourse on Colonialism, which became a staple of postcolonial thought, helping to inspire revolutionaries across the Global South to rise up against colonial regimes.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:pepqsfo4jhiwfjinmlns5tcs/bafkreiaokvochpgrc67i7onf6lted64nds7dnc55nsyd67gpsutlccx3ni@jpeg)
January 4, 2026 at 6:17 PM
This from @wihorne.bsky.social in July 2022 couldn’t be more on point and prescient for rn.
drwilliamhorne.substack.com/p/what-is-fa...
drwilliamhorne.substack.com/p/what-is-fa...
Anyway, do everyone here knows who agreed with Cesaire on this one? On the whole concept of nazism being the Imperial Boomerang returning and so on? Hannah Arendt.
Weird, right?
It used to be a consensus from the left to the smart right-wing antifascism, before the whole post-1967 shifts...
Weird, right?
It used to be a consensus from the left to the smart right-wing antifascism, before the whole post-1967 shifts...
January 4, 2026 at 8:17 PM
Anyway, do everyone here knows who agreed with Cesaire on this one? On the whole concept of nazism being the Imperial Boomerang returning and so on? Hannah Arendt.
Weird, right?
It used to be a consensus from the left to the smart right-wing antifascism, before the whole post-1967 shifts...
Weird, right?
It used to be a consensus from the left to the smart right-wing antifascism, before the whole post-1967 shifts...
Ce qui n'est pas sa faute, d'ailleurs. Il a fallu du temps pour comprendre l'exceptionnalité de la Shoah.
Remarquons en vrai qu'il y a un débat: avant Césaire, Karl Korsch disait en 1942 que le totalitarisme était l'extension des méthodes réservées aux colonisés jusque-là.
Remarquons en vrai qu'il y a un débat: avant Césaire, Karl Korsch disait en 1942 que le totalitarisme était l'extension des méthodes réservées aux colonisés jusque-là.
January 4, 2026 at 3:42 PM
Ce qui n'est pas sa faute, d'ailleurs. Il a fallu du temps pour comprendre l'exceptionnalité de la Shoah.
Remarquons en vrai qu'il y a un débat: avant Césaire, Karl Korsch disait en 1942 que le totalitarisme était l'extension des méthodes réservées aux colonisés jusque-là.
Remarquons en vrai qu'il y a un débat: avant Césaire, Karl Korsch disait en 1942 que le totalitarisme était l'extension des méthodes réservées aux colonisés jusque-là.
Bref, le tout est plutôt de précisément reconnaitre qu'il y a débat, et de ne pas sortir telle ou telle citation comme argument d'autorité irréfutable. Il ne suffit pas de s'appeler Weil, Adorno ou Césaire pour avoir inévitablement raison... ou tort, d'ailleurs.
January 4, 2026 at 3:42 PM
Bref, le tout est plutôt de précisément reconnaitre qu'il y a débat, et de ne pas sortir telle ou telle citation comme argument d'autorité irréfutable. Il ne suffit pas de s'appeler Weil, Adorno ou Césaire pour avoir inévitablement raison... ou tort, d'ailleurs.