At the heart of it all. By Martha Awojobi

Martha runs JMB Consulting, the home of Uncharitable and is a playful, yet unflinching, critic of the charity sector. Can usually be found being nerdy with spreadsheets, reading up on political theory, or being silly with friends.

It’s hard to know what to say. We wish that we didn’t have to say anything at all. In just the past week we have seen activists on the Global Flotilla Sumud kidnapped by Israel, imprisoned and subjected to horrific acts of violence and intimidation. We have mourned two Jewish men, killed at a synagogue in Manchester. We have watched in horror as Black children were dragged from their homes, zip-tied and detained by ICE in Chicago. A mosque set on fire in Sussex. Meanwhile the bombs still rain over Palestine.

And at the heart of it all is imperialism.

There are other things that we haven’t seen. Violences done behind closed doors that we will never bear witness to. Violence inflicted on those deemed unworthy of our grief by virtue of their skin colour. More violence than our hearts could hold. When one of the most famous white activists in the world can be kidnapped and allegedly subjected to torture with millions of eyes on them, what do you think is happening to the people whose names we will never know? If the value of Congolese lives can be weighed up against the price of an iPhone, and property developers can draw up plans for luxury apartments on top of the mass graves of a genocided people, then none of us are truly free.

And at the heart of it all is imperialism.

Imperialism has always been seen as something that happens to Black and brown people ‘over there’ in the colonies. Over the past 500 years governments in Europe and North America imposed political, economic, and cultural dominance over foreign nations in the ‘Global South’. We who dwell in the heart of the empire, or the ‘imperial core’, are often unaware that the same violence inflicted on colonised countries always comes home to roost via the ‘imperial boomerang effect.’ 

The boomerang effect explains how empires use colonies as laboratories to test and perfect methods of counter-insurgency, social control and repression, methods which are then brought back and deployed against marginalised people within their national borders. 

Many people are witnessing our government’s complicity - no, it’s active participation -  in heinous human rights abuses and genocide: supplying arms to Israel, using Cyprus (a country occupied by the UK) as an army base for intelligence operations, removing funding for UNRWA. Then the boomerang returns to crack down on pro-Palestine protests, proscribe a non-violent group as terrorists and arrest thousands of demonstrators. The Al Jazeera news team in Gaza has been systematically executed by the Israeli Occupation Forces, backed by European and American imperialists. The boomerang returns again, as our mainstream media outlets peddle misinformation, stoke political tension and pit the working classes against each other through the so-called ‘culture wars’.

Meanwhile charity leaders' decry ‘this isn’t who we are; this isn’t the UK that I know’. ‘We stand against hate’ whilst rubbing shoulders with war criminals.

Honey, this is exactly who we are and have been; this is the UK that colonised people have always known. Britannia rules the waves. Imperialism has always had its boot on the neck of those it deems disposable. This is just the first time you’ve witnessed it. This is the first time it has affected you and not just ‘those people over there’. Fascism is just imperialism coming back home. 

The Met Police that spends its weekends arresting pensioners who stand against colonialism and genocide was trialled as an armed occupying force and surveillance operation in colonial Ireland. Decades later, the boomerang returned and The London Metropolitan police was founded in 1829 in response to a wave of domestic unrest. The Met Police Special Branch has driven political surveillance on anarchists, suffragettes and socialists. Over 100 years later in 2010 it was revealed that the Branch has infiltrated over 1000 political groups, with one of main targets being Black justice campaigns formed by first and second generation migrants from former African and Caribbean colonies. The Secret Service Bureau (now rebranded to the MI5), was set up in 1909 by the Committee of Imperial Defence in response to growing international anti-colonial resistance. It worked alongside the Special Branch to surveil and disrupt movements on the left throughout the 20th century. The function of the police has always been protecting Britain’s ruling class and the interests of imperialism, from occupied Ireland to Defend Our Juries.

At the heart of British policing, the genocide of the Palestinian people, the antisemitic murder in Manchester, the disappearance of migrants by ICE agent - at the heart of it all, is imperialism.

Capitalism demands human sacrifice, and we are potential offerings to the gods of consumption and extraction. You can either believe us now, or wait until the boomerangs hit you in the face on its way back from the colonies.

The boomerang doesn’t just come in the form of policy and institutions; it returns to colonise our souls. To look away, deny and minimise, do our silly little emails and act like everything is fine is an abandonment of our very humanity. To dehumanise and degrade the ‘other’, the ‘terrorist,’ the ‘threat to our way of life’, we must first dehumanise and degrade ourselves. The normalised violence of imperialism pollutes our relationship with others and ourselves just as much as it pollutes our air, rivers and land. 

But the veil is lifting, the mask of imperialism is slipping to reveal the true monstrosity behind our liberal world order. More of us are seeing that our struggles are connected across time and geography, that our fates are intertwined. So our resistance must be just as interconnected.

Resistance requires that we remember who we are in our fullness. Our love, rage, grief, joy and our commitment to life. We cannot let the racist violence in Manchester and Sussex last week become normalised within our communities, nor can we allow the state to use this as an opportunity to further criminalise anti-colonial resistance.

Imperialism and fascism mean death. So we must choose life. The future is ours, and we all have a role to play in the movement for justice and liberation. Our sector must come together to connect our movements and we must resist the Empire with all our might. Solidarity is more vital now than it has ever been. We need more hope, more love, more joy and more connectedness. Our role is to reconnect, to see the ways that our histories and our futures are bound together.
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