Imperialism’s tactics return to undermine the imperial nation itself.

Evidence

In the middle book of The Origins of Totalitarianism, titled Imperialism, Hannah Arendt explores the political history and implications of imperial rule, noting its bases of authority and actions in the world. She draws attention precisely to many of those pursuits and tactics of imperialism that confront us today: the establishment of penal colonies, the horrors of conquest, wild profiteering, colonial lawlessness, arbitrary and exceptional exercises of power, and the growth of racism along with its political exploitation. Arendt and others also have warned that in the long run imperialism tends not to be exercised solely in some blank, foreign space “out there” but has the dangerous capacity to return home and undermine the nation. She borrows this observation in part from the historian of the British Empire J. A. Hobson, who observed long ago that imperialism corrodes a nation’s psyche and endangers its republican institutions. Arendt labels her caution the “boomerang effects” of imperialism. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 991

Categorization

• XREF: Boomerang effects of empire connect to how the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and surveillance state strain US liberties — relevant to the reader’s general interest in empire and domestic blowback. — connects to: Empire must keep reworking itself and can fail to secure racial regimes — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 105
• DEFINE: Arendt’s ‘boomerang effects’ is a named concept worth remembering.