Herero Genocide & The Imperial Boomerang: The Western Modus Operandi And What This Means For Us All
Essay
Introduction
A crisis befalls a European population. Ideas of territorial expansion take hold. Settler-colonizers arrive in a foreign locale, taking more land for themselves - naturally leaving less to the indigenous population. Crowded out from their own land, the natives resist, killing a decent number of their occupiers. The settler-colonizers and their backers in the West go ballistic, launching a large-scale propaganda war, “a savage race…killing our children…raping our women,” etc.
Familiar?
Well, in this case we are not speaking of THAT settler-colony, but rather their predecessors - the German settler-colonizers in German Southwest Africa (modern day Namibia).
This is the story of the first genocide of the 20th century, the first German genocide during the Second Reich (with the current genocide, the Germans are now complicit in their third genocide in the last hundred-odd years). Shit, in that regard, they’ve got the Americans beat (only complicit in two genocides, the poor sods).
My goal in writing this essay is not to write a historical account of the genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples, many others are certainly more qualified. Therefore, I must first ask for forgiveness for any historical details I gloss over or misunderstand. The point here is to draw more general conclusions about Western complicity in crimes against humanity in the global south, and trace what this means for Western populations. However, some historical context is necessary for the reader to understand the gravity of the event.
Herero Genocide
The Germans at the turn of the previous century were starting to face a major population crisis, with so many of their people having migrated to the United States - a result of the famine. Lebensraum (Living Space), in the geopolitical context, was developed by Friedrich Ratzel around 1901. He spoke of the necessity of territorial expansion for the Germanic peoples, deemed necessary for the growing German population and its access to resources.
The Herero, one of the more “modernized” peoples in Southwest Africa possessing some of the latest technology, initially attempted to normalize relations with the German settlers - for some reason, most colonized peoples seem to choose this route as an initial course of action, always to their detriment, of course (see, e.g., the Wampanoag nation in colonial America). The German settler-colonizers, their being colonizers, could not quench their appetite for expansion. Time to put these ideas of Lebensraum into practice, and this semi-arid expanse with a limited populace of “barbaric peoples” provided the perfect space for them to do so.
Naturally, this suffocation of the Herero people (among other nations, such as the Nama), caused feelings of disenfranchisement among the civilian population led by the charismatic Samuel Maharero, who figured that German expansionism meant the subjugation of his people. Well, he did the thing that all resistance leaders do when political avenues and non-violent means of resistance fail…
The Herero besieged German bases and killed over 100 settlers.
The then-colonial Governor of German Southwest Africa, Theodor Leutwein, proposed negotiations with the Herero. Unfortunately and expectedly, German racism, machismo, hatred, and horror at the event corrupted the halls of the Reichstag and the Kaiser’s mind, who wanted nothing less than the complete destruction of the Herero. Governer Leutwein was deposed and replaced by a man with balls big enough to get the job done, Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha - a sort of spiritual forefather of some of today’s genocidal generalissimos. Von Trotha was the son of Prussian aristocrats and had experience subjugating peoples of the Global South (see, e.g., von Trotha’s role in the Boxer Rebellion).
For the first time in history, the extermination of an entire people was committed to paper by our good friend, von Trotha.
"I know the tribes of Africa…They are all alike. They only respond to force. It was and is my policy to use force with terrorism and even brutality. I shall annihilate the African tribes with streams of blood and streams of gold…I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country."
“My intimate knowledge of many central African nations (Bantu and others) has everywhere convinced me of the necessity that the Negro does not respect treaties but only brute force.”
Familiar?
And so with that, genocide of the Herero (and the Nama) began by displacing them into the Kalahari Desert, and the Germans sealed off their colonies. Starvation, dehydration, and genocidal military contingents led to the death of approximately 100,000 Herero (and 10,000 Nama).
Protests erupted in the homeland, who deemed the explicit genocide of the Herero unacceptable for a range of reasons. For example, the former Governor Leutwein said this:
“I do not concur with those fanatics who want to see the Herero destroyed altogether...I would consider such a move a grave mistake from an economic point of view. We need the Herero as cattle breeders...and especially as labourers.”
A more liberal view by Chancellor Bülow, which at the heart of which is a concern for German self-interest, is evident when he told the Kaiser that von Trotha’s strategy was:
“Contrary to Christian and humanitarian principle, economically devastating and damaging to Germany's international reputation.”
There was no serious commitment to the fact, or movement stating, that the Herero were racially equal to the Germans and as such must be given their land and human rights.
To cut a long and very brutal story unjustly short, von Trotha was forced to halt his plan, the Herero and Nama were placed in the first concentration camps designed for the extermination of entire groups of people (see, e.g., Shark Island Concentration Camp), 85% of the Herero perished - mostly women and children. The Germans got away scot-free, and all the “condemnations” by the international community amounted to a pile of Prussian shit.
Familiar?
From Second to Third Reich: The Imperial Connection
Of course, to historians of the Nazi era, the Herero (and Nama) genocide provides a historical framework for many of the concepts used and developed by the Aryan supremacists.
The first of these concepts to be used was Lebensraum, distracting from the perils that befell Weimar Germany by claiming that the solutions to the Reich’s problems could be solved by the implementation of hyper-imperial sentiments. If only the Germans could acquire more land, all their political, economic, and social woes would miraculaously end. This, of course, was part and parcel of the nationalist myths purported by the Nazis.
“There was a myth in part of the German collective imagination according to which its Eastern European territories were illegitimately occupied by Slavic and Baltic populations after the fall of the Roman Empire through barbaric invasions (including by the Huns and Avars, etc.). The longing for that ancient Germania Magna was one of the intellectual motors that drove Nazis to invade and annex Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Lithuania.”
de Betoño, Fernández (2020). "The Nazi anti-urban utopia: 'Generalplan Ost'"
Familiar?
Of course, Nazi beliefs about the German Übermenschen and the Slavic/Jewish/Romani/Bolshevik Untermenschen led to a wide array of domestic and foreign policy ideas of how to deal with this racial imbalance. Depending on the ethnic group and time period in question, there was a whole host of ideas from within the Nazi ruling elite about how to deal with this “racial imbalance”, ranging from sealing them off, to racial replacement - a natural extension of Lebensraum, to full-blown genocide. And we all know how that story ended. The latter of these methods was developed from von Trotha’s Konzentrationslager (concentration camps) in German Southwest Africa (von Trotha, by the way, was celebrated as a German hero and an ideal for the Nazis).
Of course, this is a gross underrepresentation of the details of the Second and Third Reich’s crimes vis-a-vis their victims, but I shall leave this section here, since I believe that I have provided sufficient contextual information for examining the post-war attitudes of the Western hemisphere.
American Attitudes in the Post-War Period
The World War II, the second war to end all wars, has come to an end. 50 million have perished (of which 80% were Soviets and Chinese), and the US has emerged as the sole benefactor of all the blood that was spilled. Through its superior army, it forced a Pax Americana at the end of a rifle barrel.
What were they to do with a military industrial complex of that size? Not use it against the Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Chinese, Indonesians, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians, Hondurans, Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans, Yugoslavians, Congolese, Libyans, Lebanese, Palestinians, Iraqis? If I wished to further bore the reader, or entertain the imperialist psychopath among them, the list would go on. But…but…at the time, the USSR and its politburo posed a global Communist threat that needed to be contained, or whatever their bullshit excuse was.
It got a lot harder to use that as an excuse with the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the war must go on, for what were the Americans to do with a military industrial complex of that size, not manufacture a ‘War on Terror’ that would see the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Libyans, Sudanese, Somalis, Yemenis? If I wished to further bore the reader, or entertain the imperialist psychopath among them, the list would go on.
And save for protests - which to the Western world may seem significant, but which I consider limited - against the Vietnam war, the Second Gulf war, and the Gaza genocide, there was absolute silence amid the squawking of the war hawks.
Okay, Okay, We Get the Point…What’s the Point?
Now that I’ve gone on my anti-American rant, which all of us soft leftists have repeated time and time again, I can finally connect the threads.
The idea here is to tell the Western reader…they’re coming for you too. We, the peoples of the Global South, are little more than lab rats. Whether the capitalist ruling elite of the West is aware of it or not, we the melanated creatures always provide a blueprint for what the ruling elite can get away with in their own countries.
In the process of writing this essay, I coincidentally discovered that this is a fully-developed theory named the Imperial Boomerang theory - see Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism for a more poignant and eloquent version of my reflections.
Anyway…
If this boomerang effect isn’t evident in my demonstration of how the very same tactics used by the Second Reich to oppress the Herero (and the Nama) were used by the Third against the civilized, white citizens of Europe, I can give you another example - the British were the first to use aerial bombardments against a civilian population (in the Iraqi revolution against British imperialism in the 1920s), a technique used quite casually throughout the Second World War.
“That’s history, a bygone era, in which human rights and international institutions did not exi--”
The American ruling class has been working on the very same project in the last few decades, which you may have noticed, if you had a pair of eyes and a semi-functioning brain (sorry to antagonise the wilfully blind and ignorant).
Like the previous examples I used, there is much to say about this issue, so for the sake of brevity, I will only use a few examples of American crony capitalists to illustrate the point.
Let’s start with the Resnick family, one that has gained recent attention since the LA fires. The Resnicks, headed by the patriarch Stewart Resnick, have been a major lobbying force for the pistachio industry (yes, we’re talking about nuts, and it doesn’t help, of course, that Mr. Resnick looks like my left one). He is the CEO of Wonderful Co. and has lobbied for tighter sanctions on Iran, the main player in the global pistachio market. So, in order to gain more market share in the pistachio world, Stewart Resnick has pushed for more crushing sanctions against the Iranian population.
It doesn’t end there, of course, he also happens to be one of the biggest donors to the Israeli Occupation Forces. Journalist Yasha Levine has long covered the Resnicks and their ties to the American and Israeli political elite, his article titled “California pistachio billionaires helping Israel’s occupation regime” says this of their funds to the Israeli military: “funneled through an outfit called the American Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces.1 Adding it all up comes to millions of dollars — $2.4 million just between 2015 and 2022.”
And in comes the boomerang effect, Stewart Resnick has managed to gain control of a large swath of California’s water by controlling political avenues which allow him (as well as other agro-billionaires) to manipulate the path of water streams through aquaducts for the express purpose of terraforming the vast swaths of semi-arid land that they own. Might I add here, that control of water resources in semi-arid lands has been a long-time policy of Israel, so if the shoe fits, I guess.
Miriam Adelson - Israeli-American billionaire, lobbyist, and Zionazi extraordanaire - has gained much political attention in the wake of her husband’s death - one Sheldon Adelson. Even though, Miriam Adelson has been pulling the strings from behind the curtain, influencing her late husband’s fervent Zionism, she has taken center stage after his welcomed death. Miriam Adelson has been known to have extreme views (even by Zionist standards) with regards to Zionist expansion into the occupied West Bank. She has also influenced many American politicians’, notably Trump’s, extreme views and policies regarding the Zionist settler-colony (even by American standards). One example of that is her lobbying for American recognition of the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory. Much more could be said about this demonic couple and their bolstering of the Zionist colony, which is to say, their destructive, imperialist role in Middle Eastern politics. However, we will leave it at that for now.
And in comes the boomerang effect - the Adelsons have supplied republican candidates with around $500 million in campaign funds. Most recently, the widow Adelson has donated around $100 million to President Donald Trump in the 2024 election - this one is for all the “liberal Zionists” that lament Trump’s election. Moreover, US intelligence apparatuses have also relied on Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands, to spy on Julian Assange, as was revealed in a brilliant article by The Gray Zone titled, ‘The American friends’: New court files expose Sheldon Adelson’s security team in US spy operation against Julian Assange”.
A couple of enlightening quotes on this matter:
“Throughout the black operations campaign, US intelligence appears to have worked through Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands, a company that had previously served as an alleged front for a CIA blackmail operation several years earlier. The operations formally began once Adelson’s hand-picked presidential candidate, Donald Trump, entered the White House in January 2017 […] When Adelson’s favored candidate, Donald Trump, moved into the Oval Office, the CIA came under the control of Mike Pompeo, another Adelson ally who seemed to relish the opportunity to carry out illegal acts, including spying on American citizens, in the name of national security.”
Time to talk about the tech bros. Yeah…I’m not happy about wasting ink on these mouth-breathers either, especially with all the coverage they’ve received in the first month of 2025, but I need to drive the point home. Elon Musk belongs to a family that belonged to the Nazi party of Canada, and moved to South Africa in the 20th century because of their pro-Apartheid views.
“Musk’s father, Errol, was also in the mining business among other interests. He once boasted that his stake in Zambian emerald mines made him “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe”. Musk’s mother, Maye, has said the family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and a handful of luxury cars. Errol Musk has said that he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal party but then left because he didn’t like its demand for one person, one vote, and instead favored a more gradual reform with separate parliaments for different races. That was the liberal position inside the Musk family,” says Chris McGreal in an article in The Guardian titled, “How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa”.
So, it’s not surprising that Elon Musk has had far-right views, which most billionaires seem to have. In recent years, he has supported alt-right conspiracies, the neo-Nazi AFD party in Germany, far-right elements within an already far-right Zionist entity etc. His suppression of Palestinian and pro-Palestine voices on X has garnered criticism in the past year.
A similar story applies to Mark Zuckerburg, whose Meta has long done the bidding of Israeli politicians seeking to silence pro-Palestine content. As one 2016 Haaretz article informs us, “Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said on Monday that Facebook and YouTube had been complying in recent months with up to 95% of Israel’s requests for taking down content that the government says incites Palestinian violence.” This policy has only been further ingrained in Meta’s policies, with the Human Rights Watch claiming that over 1000 takedowns of pro-Palestine content has taken place across Instagram and Facebook from October to December of 2023. Furthermore, a 2024 article by the Intercept tells us this: “A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.”
So, it is no surprise that these same online suppression tactics that are being used to silence critics of Israel (or as I call them, people on the right side of history) are now being used to manipulate Americans, as Musk and Zuckerburg both unleash new policies regarding the ‘acceptance’ of alt-right content and the removal of fact-checkers on their platforms. “Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will end their third-party fact checking program, loosen their hate speech restrictions, and move some of the company to Texas.”
So, to those civilized citizens in the West, who are complicit in word, action, or lack thereof, to you I say, good luck, they’re coming for you too.
I will leave you with Aimé Césaire’s opening quote in “Discourse on Colonialism”: “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization. A civilization that plays fast and loose with its principles is a dying civilization”.
Just some food for thought…