That can be welcomed, but only with a tentative nod. Trump occasionally argues that he’s saved his people from the nation’s “endless wars,” reducing the U.S. Trumpism can bring to bloody and more visible culmination the corporate rule whose domination in the past was so pervasively hegemonic that it often went unnoticed, save by those who were made to suffer it so chronically. Trumpism’s blade, though, now without pretense or surely of “civility,” is raised to slice away any vestige of institutions protecting the long repressed and those who stand with them. liberals and neoliberal structures of violence. Although Trump styles himself as critic of the liberal “radical” Left, he is actually the returning and whirling scythe of U.S. Similarly Trump and Trumpism can be viewed as a “terrific boomerang effect” from past and present structures of American elite rule.

His fascism was the effect of a “boomerang” coming back into European culture from European rulers’ own ways of building up its powers over decades and centuries, in colonialism abroad and also exploitation in European lands own past histories. “Without being aware of it,” Césaire wrote, “the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century has a Hitler inside him.” Hitler’s emergence in Europe was to Césaire not the imposition of a surprising antithetical force.

The “civil” niceties of ruling elites may be distinctive and at times even less dangerous, but they are integral to ruling elites’ ways of being, of maintaining their power. Members of this corporatocracy often style themselves as champions of civility, antithetical in their politics and culture to crass, authoritarian and fascist figures. two-party corporatocracy, involving its ultra-rich donors and those who support them. “bourgeois” state, our long-dominant U.S. But he is those things as an outgrowth sprung from within the U.S. No, instead I am voting for Biden because his presidential regime would present the real target at which we must take aim and resist with ever stronger rising social movements for justice and peace. I will support a Biden vote, but this is not because I embrace the idea that Biden is “ the lesser evil,” “ lesser racist” or perhaps to demote Biden further, “ the least worst.”

Césaire’s words also make very clear, though, why any election of Biden will not solve our national crisis.

They can even clarify why strong critics of the current two party corporate/warrior class nevertheless can approach the 2020 presidential election to vote for the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. ruling groups that we ignore at our peril.Įspecially Césaire’s views on the “terrific boomerang effect” need to be recalled and owned anew. Just ten years after Hitler’s demise in World War II, this young Francophone and French poet, an Afro-Caribbean intellectual and politician from the island of Martinique, shares truths about European and U.S. – CC BY 2.0Īnd then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.Īime Césaire’s words of 1955 in his Discourse on Colonialism (36) burn brightly still to illumine the politics at work in 2020 America.

Boomerang definition