The ‘Boomerang Thesis’
Most readings of Origins concerned with imperialism centre on what is known as the ‘boomerang thesis' or what Arendt herself calls the ‘boomerang effect'. Arendt's usage of this term shifts in the book, making it difficult to pinpoint her ideas accurately.
And in spite of its importance to Arendt's later readers, the term ‘boomerang effect' only appears four times in the 600-page book, putting the boomerang thesis on thin foundations.[431] In the most general terms, one might think of this question within Arendt's overall argument that Europe's civilising process derailed itself in imperialism's racism, rapacious expansion and lawless rule. Imperialism ‘led to an almost complete break in the continuous flow of Western history as we had known it for more than two thousand years', Arendt writes, and this served as ‘a preparatory stage for coming catastrophes'.30 Practices and thoughts that developed in Africa returned to Europe in totalitarianism. Thus, scholars evoking the boomerang thesis will generally write about imperialism's ‘creating the conditions of possibility' for totalitarianism, or that ‘imperialism had set the stage for totalitarianism'.[432] This interpretation informs the work of two researchers who have undertaken studies emblematic of how the boomerang thesis has been used to link imperialism and the Holocaust, and it points to their shortcomings. The first is French scholar Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison and his 2005 book Coloniser, exterminer: sur la guerre et l'etat colonial (Colonise, Exterminate: On War and the Colonial State). The second is German historian Jürgen Zimmerer, who has published a series of studies since the early 2000s. Le Cour Grandmaison's book concentrates on the links between the Holocaust and France's conquest of Algeria (1830-71). This conquest is regularly upheld by historians as one of the most violent of Europe's modern global expansion. It ravaged Algerian society, which lost roughly half of its precolonial population of 3-4 million people to the direct violence of military encounters, as well as the famines, epidemics and emigration triggered by the conquest.[433] As such, it serves Le Cour Grandmaison as a case from which he will deduce the ‘origins' of the Holocaust. Coloniser, exterminer takes as its primary sources the accounts published contemporaneous to the conquest. Hardly hidden from the public view, the violence was well known at the time. Along with those condemning it were those who celebrated it in dangerous groundbreaking theories of genocide. These included plans to ‘make disappear, by means of a war of annihilation, all life deemed useless, a nuisance, or dangerous'.[434] Thus he argues that French colonialism has to be understood primarily as a project of extermination, a point announced clearly in the book's title.Le Cour Grandmaison takes up the boomerang thesis and seems to share Arendt's understanding that colonialism diverted the trajectory of European history. Thus the ‘constraints and self-restraint effective in Europe fell apart over there'.34 Military practices forged in Algeria travelled to France in incidents such as the army's crushing of the 1848 workers' movement (known as the ‘Bedouin of the metropole'), along with the laws of exception first imposed on Muslims in Algeria, and then on non-citizens and Jews in France, as well as, finally, in more diffuse ways, an early ‘brutalisation' of European society, one that occurred well before 1914-18 when George Mosse first observed its importance. Ultimately, ‘what was perpetrated in Algeria constitutes a disturbing precedent... and a major rupture', with new forms of violence specific to colonial contexts appearing on the European continent.[435] These transformed thinking about the nature of human life, and these in turn shifted political relations by enlarging the boundaries of state violence.
In sum, Le Cour Grandmaison sees these as so many ‘new “red threads” beginning in Algeria and leading to the totalitarian disasters'.[436]Finding the same red threads preoccupies German historian Jürgen Zimmerer, who seeks the links between imperial Germany's genocide of the Herero (1904-8) in Namibia and the Nazi's brutal occupation of eastern Europe and the Holocaust. Zimmerer argues that Nazi policies in the Holocaust must be studied alongside German imperialism in Africa. Building upon a famous 1941 quote of Hitler - ‘Russian territory is our India' - Zimmerer argues the Nazis looked to the short-lived projects of German imperialism (the Allies stripped Germany of its empire after 1918) as well as to the successful empires of the British and French to conceive their later plans for Europe. ‘Nazi policies for the occupied areas of Poland and the Soviet Union must also be viewed as part of the global historical tradition of colonial rule', he writes.[437] The way in which a boomerang returns to Europe from Africa is considered in a number of guises, what Zimmerer calls ‘transmission channels', such as the personnel who worked first in the German colonial administration and then for the Nazis. Zimmerer's most important contribution comes in response to his question, ‘Where did the idea that an entire people could simply be “exterminated” come from, on what discursive conditions did it rest?'[438] He finds answers in an ‘archaeology of genocide', or the common discursive formations and the archive of experiences on which the Nazis drew. This brings Michel Foucault into Zimmerer's conceptual and theoretical scaffolding, adopting the French philosopher's early ‘archaeological' project of understanding the historical conditions that make certain forms of thought possible in a given moment. Archaeology thereby gives Zimmerer a way to constitute an ‘origin' for Nazi violence in a conventional sense.
‘European colonialism is an important historical starting point for the Nazis', Zimmerer writes, ‘as it rests onfundamentally similar concepts of space and race to those at the heart of the Nazi policy of expansion and murder.'[439] Thus Africa gave ‘precursors' and ‘precedents' for Nazi ideology and policy.
Both Le Cour Grandmaison and Zimmerer have taken a great deal of fire. Reviewers in France attacked Coloniser, exterminer in shrill terms that faulted the book with a litany of errors, including, it would seem, its having reanimated controversial arguments previously used by lawyer Jacques Verges to draw analogies between French colonialism and Nazism in his defence of Klaus Barbie at the highly divisive 1987 trial.[440] And Zimmerer's historiographically more influential body of work was subjected to negative reviews in the English-speaking academic world, as well as scepticism from many scholars.[441] Besides sending something of a chilling effect into the field of colonialism and violence studies (especially for Algerian studies in France), such reviews failed to identify what I take to be the principal problem with both authors' arguments and the boomerang thesis overall: first, it puts forth a very conventional and un-Arendtian understanding of ‘origins', and, secondly, it relies on a problematic diffusionist model for its perspectives on Africa. As stated above, Arendt clearly refused the notion that totalitarianism had an originary place, a starting point on a timeline, but argued instead that it emerged from a complex process composed of many different elements. (These included ‘tribal nationalism', social imperialism, secret governance, arbitrary rule by decree and the crisis of the nation state.) Arendt's rich understanding of temporality and causation disappears in the boomerang thesis's standard search for starting points. In sum, I suggest that the boomerang thesis fails to account for violence's historicity.
It can be said in this respect that, like words, practices change meanings over time, ideas lose their original logic, policies disguise themselves (even to themselves), displacement transforms thought and affect, and goals must be improvised, often on the spot. Thus every act of violence, especially extreme violence like genocide, is in some way particular to itself.Nevertheless, the boomerang might serve as an appropriate metaphor for analysis if it is precisely understood as a thrown object, rather than used generically to denote a circular relationship. This idea can be framed by a quotation slip from the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Boomeranging is dangerous for on-lookers, till the thrower is a perfect master of his weapon.' The danger referred to here is the fact that a boomerang does not just ‘come back' from another direction or place. The path traced by this weapon is in fact counterintuitive because it can hit its target from a different direction, even in reverse to the position of the thrower. As a metaphor then, the boomerang places specific requirements upon those seeking comparative or trans-historical understanding of violence and genocide. Although it is studied ‘from Sparta to Darfur', genocide is the outcome of complex processes bound to the specific force of change and constellation of elements produced in a given time, as Arendt argues.[442] This means that the outcome of this process will be different at different moments, making precise historicisation critical and fixed trans-historical concepts problematic. Here we can look to the lessons of Foucault with regard to genealogy, and his point that nothing is immutable.[443] This observation leads to my second point: in the boomerang thesis Africa figures simply as a precursor to later developments in Europe plotted along a linear course, or, more bluntly stated, Africa serves simply as a place where Europeans start doing bad things. While Arendt's prejudicial accounts of Africans are gone in the recent scholarship, so too are Africans for the most part, who figure only in abstract form as victims.
The insights of African historiography regarding the dialogic nature of colonial relations do not enter into analysis. This deployment of the boomerang, focusing on beginnings and points of origin, can be contrasted with Isabel Hull's conclusions on the institutional culture of the German military during their devastating African campaigns against the Herero. While she pays little attention to Africans and African historiography, Hull provides important insights by remaining close to her European sources. She finds that German officers ‘learned nothing from colonial warfare that did not confirm their prejudices about the correct way to fight wars'.[444] In other words, colonial Africa served only as a testing ground for practices originating elsewhere. On the same note, one might add for the French in Algeria that their own strategies and tactics, centred on punitive raids called ‘razzias', probably originated not in northern Africa, despite the misleading name, but during the revolution's campaigns.[445]