The imperial boomerang hits LA

At noon today, two hundred members of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Infantry Regiment were deployed in Los Angeles.

While extremely unusual, this is not unprecedented — regular forces were last put into action on U.S. soil in 1992, also in LA, during the riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King.¹ What is unusual is the rhetoric that surrounded the Marine deployment, as well as the federalization of 4,000 National Guard troops — a move a federal judge has ruled was illegal.

Trump said in issuing the order that his actions were necessary in order “to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion,” declaring that a “once great American City” has been “invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals.” When Gov. Gavin Newsom objected to the use of the California National Guard without his consent² , Trump said he should be arrested. Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem upped the rhetoric even further at a press conference yesterday: “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country.” In other words, it isn’t just the immigrants who are the “invaders,” but the duly elected officials of the city and state. (U.S. Senator Alex Padilla tried to interrupt her at that point and ask a question, and only to be wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by the Secret Service.)

On one level, this kind of escalation is incomprehensible in a democracy. How have we come to a point where a president is calling for the “liberation” of one of his own cities through armed force, crushing free assembly, rounding up peaceful immigrants, and calling for the jailing (and possibly regime change) of his political rivals? Trying to understand this merely as a fight over immigration policy or National Guard procedures yields few answers to that fundamental question; a different mode of analysis is needed. What we’re witnessing in Los Angeles is what Hannah Arendt called “the boomerang effect of imperialism upon the homeland”—the methods of empire being played out on American soil.

Look at the people involved. The defense secretary now deploying Marines against an American city is the ex-Army National Guardsman Pete Hegseth, whose first overseas deployment, in 2004, was as a prison guard at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. (“My initial education on the differences between Islamist groups came over many nights in the guard tower at Guantanamo Bay,” the defense secretary later wrote.) He later served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a counterinsurgency instructor and civil-military operations. In Iraq, Hegseth was part of a unit nicknamed “Kill Company”; other soldiers in that unit, after he separated, would be convicted of war crimes. It should be expected that some of same methods used to manage “enemy combatants” in Cuba and insurgents in Iraq may now be trained on protesters in California, given that they are being depicted by the administration as traitors, invaders, or worse.

In 2005, meanwhile, the current Vice President was Cpl. James D. Hamel, a Marine public relations writer in Iraq who “would occasionally go out beyond the wire” to Al Qaim and other towns along the Euphrates River to write propaganda about U.S. operations, as one newspaper put it. On those sorties, Vance would write short vignettes about battles and equipment used in what he called “the struggle to establish a free and secure Iraq.” The Iraqis in his accounts were faceless and nameless; the Marines and their hardware shining examples of American bravery and ingenuity. All that mattered was, as one Marine he quoted put it, “saving Marines lives.”

Two decades later, Vance is again positioning himself as defending the men in uniform against a foreign, invading force, supported by a sinister fifth column: “Insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one-half of America’s political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil,” he posted on X.

The upshot is clear. What was done to the Iraqis in 2005 should now be done to Angelenos in 2025. Anything is permitted so long as it protects the men in uniform in the conduct of their duties. Whether those duties—as part of an invasion carried out on false pretenses, or immigration raids carried out without full due process—are necessary or proper is beside the point. Even asking questions about it brings the stench of disloyalty.

Arendt understood this pattern. So did Frantz Fanon. A pioneering psychologist born in the French Caribbean territory of Martinique, a volunteer with the Resistance against the Nazis in the metropole, he would live out his most consequential years as a spokesman for the Algerian revolutionary front that successfully ended over a century of oppressive French rule. “The colonial world is a Manichean world,” Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth. “The colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the colonized, i.e., with the help of his agents of law and order.” Rather, “as if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil.”

This is the logic under which immigrants must be recast as terrorists, and those who exercise their First Amendment right to defend the other constitutional rights of their neighbors as rebels against the government. Counter-insurgency tactics turn inward. Another mid-century writer who made this calculus was Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Jewish essayist who wrote in 1957: “Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom.”

The progression from Guantánamo to Los Angeles isn’t accidental. As readers of my book Gangsters of Capitalism know, the U.S. has not been exempted from this path in our history. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, the decorated Marine turned anti-imperialist activist, exemplified in a career spanning interventions in Latin America, the Philippines, and China, the American pattern was one of military force in service of profitable extraction and control. In his lifetime, Butler saw this arrangement of violence and capital turned inward, against Depression-era veterans protesting for promised financial aid and the leader of the New Deal-era welfare state that followed. Instead of giving into those tendencies, President Franklin Roosevelt changed the country’s course. He embarked on social programs that showed Americans and the world that a liberal democracy committed to free elections, peaceful transfers of power, and above all free speech could provide for its people, allies, and neighbors better than autocracies ever could.

Some will undoubtedly argue that the path out of this crisis is to give into aggression, endorsing the idea that safety will come only when enough people have been caged, deported, and dominated. But history has shown time and again that at the end of that road lies catastrophe and ruin.

Then as now, the antidote to imperial violence isn’t more sophisticated tactics or better messaging. Where the colonial model divides people into categories of human and subhuman, citizen and invader, a democratic politics recognizes that mutual dignity depends on mutual freedom. Where empire deploys Marines to protect deportation operations, solidarity builds movements to protect vulnerable communities. And where imperial spectacle demands tanks rolling through the capital to feign unchallenged military might, true democracies celebrate the courage of ordinary people standing up to attempts at instituting tyrannical power.

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