Political Memes

The argument being made here is that the current uptick in fascist violence is the 'result' of 'colonial violence abroad' giving national governments the tools necessary to brutalize the population.

This fails on several levels.

First, that fascist violence pursued thus far has overwhelmingly been through extremely crude and traditional means - half-trained thugs roaming the street, stochastic terrorism, cops with batons - not refined surveillance tools or advanced weapons. This alone makes the allegory fall flat on its face; the tools used for oppressing foreign states are not the same ones being used to oppress citizens at home currently. It would be highly unusual, for that matter, if that did become the case, as the kind of violence that is effective against cohesive organizations is rarely suited for repression of civilian unrest.

Second, it presumes that there is some 'karmic' response from the oppression of other countries that 'comes back'. The violence inflicted on other countries did not 'cause' violence to be inflicted upon the proletariat at home; violence has always been inflicted upon the proletariat at home, and the escalation is because our societies have increasingly given actual, substantial power and public support to far-right ghouls. Blaming the change on a nebulous concept of 'blowback' helps salve the consciences of idiots in favor of accelerationism by letting them tell themselves "It was always going to happen; it's ~~karma~~ the imperial boomerang!", but the idea is unconnected to any actual evidence from the real world. The violence would not be 'less' if we were Switzerland; nor would it be 'more' if we were the 19th century British Empire. The idea that colonial or neocolonial violence has a 'boomerang' effect is nothing more than religious thinking with a thin coat of red paint.

Third, it suggests that the tools being discussed were in some fundamental way developed out of the violence imposed on other countries, instead of being developed largely independently, in part because civilian surveillance (related to the first point) and repression is a very different task than the ones undertaken by foreign military interventions. Not 'better', nor necessarily 'worse', but different. Different goals, different methods, different processes. It would be like saying a bullet and a deboning knife are directly related because they both disconnect organic tissue when used in the intended way.