When the Gun Turns Inward: On the Conditionality and Complicity of American Outrage
Recent months saw the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) brought to center-stage with the murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Good in Minnesota. Conventional understanding depicts the killings as a “watershed” moment and says they’ve served as the catalyst for mass protests against ICE and the Trump administration. These protests came three months after the June 14 No Kings demonstrations saw over seven million people gather in opposition to the Trump administration — its name embodying the movement’s perception of the Trump administration as descending into authoritarianism. This perception is illustrated in reporting from ABC News, showing that 87% of Democrats believe Trump to be a fascist.
This increasing concern for American authoritarianism and domestic barbarity — especially among American Liberals — has spurred discourse surrounding the notion of the “imperial boomerang.” Attributed to Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, the “imperial boomerang” asserts that, as a result of colonialism and its inherent barbarity, the colonizer innately “proceeds towards savagery.” As an anecdotal example, in the wake of ICE’s shooting of Renée Good, a screenshot of the Wikipedia page for “The Imperial Boomerang” circulated widely on Instagram. The post, shared by the verified account @depthsofwikipedia to its 1.6 million followers, currently has over 158,000 likes. The imperial boomerang may have recently found its way into online and popular discourse, but this notion is not a novel idea. Media from One Battle After Another to Heart of Darkness — the novel Apocalypse Now is adapted from — exhibit central themes of the moral degradation (on a personal and national level) that results from American/European imperialism.
What I am more interested in is another idea in Césaire’s writing: the citizenry of the colonizing nations do not care about this barbarity until it is inflicted upon them. In regards to the imperial population, Césaire writes that “before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it.” It is absolved because, until then, it had only been perpetuated onto groups of “others.” While this notion has become more prevalent recently, as mentioned above, that the imperial boomerang is circulated in media and academia is not enough to signal a step towards meaningful societal change and/or Americans’ self-awareness of their complicity in domination. This is due to the fact that those who benefit from this domination employ a thought process that distances themselves from this domination’s perpetuation, shielding themselves from criticisms that might implicate them. It is easy for the American Liberal to call Trump a tyrant and push the ails of colonization and conquest onto him, ICE or the abstract of “American fascism.” It is much harder to understand and acknowledge our own complicity in its perpetuation and barbarity.
With this in mind, it is telling that the catalyst for mass protest among American Liberals is the killing of two white Americans — Alex Pretti and Renée Good. These killings are abhorrent, but they are not a departure from American brutality in the Middle East or cruelty domestically directed towards immigrant and other vulnerable minority populations. Then, widespread Liberal protest can be seen as indicative of a mass psychology that ignores violence on others within and outside of American borders, remains complicit in its perpetuation, and yet takes extreme offense to the suppression of their own civil liberties.
In his Substack article “Imperial Boomerang,” Chris Hedges puts it aptly, writing, “the murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province.” Why is it the case that the September 12 shooting of Silverio Villegas González, a Mexican father shot and killed by ICE recently during a traffic stop, did not cause Americans to take to the street en masse? One may argue that the difference in reaction between the Minneapolis killings and a shooting like González’s is due to the publicized nature of the ICE murders in Minneapolis. However, that argument is indicative of a society in which only certain types of state killings are allowed to be atrocities, while others are tolerated and ignored.
It is telling that the single-day protest movement with one of the largest turnouts — No Kings — was oriented at protecting the rights of the American Liberal domestically. Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a nonprofit organization dedicated to tracking protests, reports that there had been 6,097 “pro-Palestine protests” in the United States between 2023 and 2025. In comparison, No Kings organizers report having more than 2,700 protests in the United States on October 18 alone. What the ethos of “No Kings” tells us is that once the American Liberal feels that their rights are threatened, they will show dissent. Until then, that that the Liberal is complicit in genocide and military strikes that leave communities in wreckage and the imposition of American will onto nations is not enough to spur a mass protest movement at the same level of “No Kings.”
Yes, it is important to be aware that American imperialism is turning inwards towards the American people. But American imperialism is something that we have long accepted. We’ve accepted it every time we’ve boasted American superiority and any time we have enjoyed the material benefits of our domination without blinking an eye. What is a much more tragic story to me is that of those that have had this degradation systemically imposed onto them. Those that have had the system of American domination forced onto them. A system of domination that Césaire describes as uniquely being a “machine for crushing, for grinding, for degrading peoples,” from which “one never recovers… unscarred.” It is our tacit acceptance of this domination that allows its perpetuation. When Americans don’t balk at the White House’s official X account posting plans for “New Gaza” — featuring a completely remade Gaza built around tourism, transportation and energy infrastructure — we are exhibiting this tacit acceptance. To act as if we are the great sufferers of American imperialism, to take to the streets and protest American brutality only once it turns inwards on white Americans, is to ignore the ruin left by American imperialism and its liberal — lowercase L — enterprise.
Understanding American domination as mechanized suggests that it is maintained by each individual part of the system. That is to say, that the engine of domination runs on you and me as much as it runs on ICE, Trump or any other individual actor. When the American Liberal protests our current administration, there seems to be an implicit claim made that these issues are manufactured only by the actions of the Trump regime. That is to say that American barbarity, abroad and domestically, is an evil that can be defeated merely with a change in administration. To posit that is to ignore the systemic nature of American domination both externally and internally. It is to ignore American expansion’s direct tie to imperial brutality. To push the ills caused by American conquest — the internal barbarity, the international ruin and the ecological terror — onto any single actor is to exonerate the system that underlies it. It is to absolve the system we tacitly and actively tolerate and perpetuate until it begins to impact us.
If my article seems overly critical of the American Liberal, it is not because they are in any way more at fault than those that celebrate global conquest and those that cheer ICE on from the sidelines. Rather, my focus stems from the fact that the American Liberal believes themselves to be on the right side of history — and are at least able to identify the surface-level symptoms of the ails they protest — but they do not follow that identification all the way to the source. The current mode of American Liberal protest/outrage as only taking root in response to the perceived infringement of their own rights demonstrates their inability to see their own participation and complicity in the “wrong” side of history.
I do not wish to contend that the protests of the American Liberal are pointless. I abhor the murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Good. I too do not wish for my country to be run by a king. These protests are valuable in that they signal to the administration that authoritarian overreach will not go unanswered. But when the buck stops there, and when these are the inciting incidents for mass protest, what are we saying about ourselves other than that we only care when the gun is pointed at us?
Image from Chad Davis, licensed under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).