Omar Sabbour writes:

[T]he teenage anti-imperialist is not a teenager. Indeed, many politicisied adolescents are amongst the most willing to partake in risks to bring about radical change, their sense of right, justice, and their passion are often a crucial part of activist and advocacy movements. They break from the mould that often surrounds them through their engagement with issues and causes that may be beyond the narrow concerns immediately directly affecting their lives. And while the analyses of young anti-imperialists in their teenage years may often have proved, with time, to have been revealed to simplistic or binary in certain ways – it is the strength of their unbridled empathy, ferocity of purpose, and stronger sense of justice – all features which are often less diluted by the passing of the years – that is crucial for their later development.

In other words, this piece is not about the ‘anti-imperialist teenager’ – who has taken an avid interest in imperialism(s) and its histories and wants to play a part in making a better world. It is about older, often professional, ‘anti-imperialists’ whose analysis is marked so heavily by the most self-centered and reactive (and reactionary) dynamics which are often associated in popular culture with teenage rebellion (though again, such a popular conception may be unfair as such features are by all means not unanimous amongst all adolescents). They possess the same identity conflict that informs a counter-conformity and contrarianism in their analyses and narratives. Yet while teenage rebellions are often time-limited – a short stage in life – and indeed, while not all teenage rebellions are actually superficial, petulant, or contrarian (many teenage rebellions are, in fact, righteous in nature and crucial for their character development) – the ‘teenage anti-imperialist’ in our formulation is the anti-imperialist who has adopted the most superficial and morally-vacuous aspects of ‘rebellion’ – which subsequently is not geographically restricted to their parents at home or time-restricted to the period of adolescence – but rooted in a same superficial, contrarian, identity politics that they then project over faraway conflicts.

So, to commence. The definition of imperialism, for the teenage anti-imperialist, has little to do with the actual policies of the state in question which is accused of being imperialist. It has to do effectively with the state’s racial or ethnic identity, and how it relates to their own. So long as the state in question is not Western – i.e. is not the ‘parent’ they are rebelling against – it could do almost anything. It matters little to the teenage anti-imperialist that Russia is the prime sponsor of the Western far-right, or that it is the prime source of Islamophobia around the world today through its various diversified media channels. It matters little that the Assad regime – which the teenage anti-imperialist says is a victim – declares explicitly (in Assad’s own words) that “terrorism will export itself to Europe through illegal migration”. It matters little that such a regime supported Donald Trump’s racist Muslim refugee ban (at the time when the regime was bouyed by Trump’s initial election victory and his condemnation of the rebels), or that it hosts and welcomes Western far-right delegations in its capital. It matters little that it is a regime that constitutes the single biggest trojan horse of Islamophobia and the War on Terror that the region has perhaps ever seen. And it is of no consequence that that regime is a native client, in every sense of the word: politically, ideologically (this, crucially, crossed geopolitical divides), and militarily – of imperialism, simply because at this particular moment in time, the regime is rhetorically condemned by the (Western) establishment ‘parent’. [Continue reading…]