What comes after “decolonization”? A screaming

A scream rings out through the air: it’s a fighter jet.

The decolonization of Africa and Asia was a largely 20th-century demise of European colonialism. In 1957, Ghana gained independence from the British Empire. Malaysia’s independence was announced that same year — Merci! Freedom! In 1975, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam declared independence. It was 2023 and Palestine —

I grew up in the state of Penang, Malaysia, and attended a public high school in the township of Butterworth. On my high school alumni association mailing list, a former student once sent in pictures of “old Penang”. Included were pictures of the Australian Air Force base in Butterworth in the 1960s and 70s, when Malaysia became a federation and the US was waging a crusade against Vietnam, both of which were supported by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). The RAAF, a great purveyor of brutality, is pictured starting the engine of a fighter jet built in France and flown in from Australia to slaughter the Vietnamese people.

Imperialism is a joint dictatorship of neo-colonies like Malaysia, and settler states like Australia and the temporary Zionist entity. A highly dynamic system that creates spit hoods in Darwin, Aboriginal deaths on the Tiwi Islands, offshore detention in Nauru and torture camps in the Negev, imperialism is a global consensus. A bloodthirsty network of states and multinational corporations, imperialism subjugates indigenous sovereignty, Palestine and another possibility: a stateless, classless and humane society created after total liberation.

RAAF Station Butterworth, 1960s-70s

“MALAYSIA, USA / HOW MANY CHILDREN DID YOU KILL TODAY?”: The Semi-Colony

In Malaysia, decolonization was not yet complete. In the 1960s and 1970s, Malaysia became a British puppet regime, an imperial experiment. We were ruled by compradors — an indigenous trading class intent on building a subordinate but mutually beneficial partnership in crime with British capital. These compradors were protected by Malaysia’s “founding father,” Tunku Abdul Rahman, a self-proclaimed playboy who had an upper-class British education. Tunku was granted symbolic independence to defend British influence and maintain their dominance of our economy.

Disappointingly, this semi-colonial Malaysia was also complicit in the Vietnam War. Despite being recognized by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Malaysia is aligned with the counter-revolution in the “Third World”. Butterworth, a transport hub for Penang, is where the UK mobilized Commonwealth troops for the slaughter of Vietnam and where the RAAF Transport Flight Vietnam (RTFV) set up operations. Here, RTFV members honed their flying skills by preparing cargo planes that were assembled in Canada and flown to Malaysia to violently confront Hanoi. Imperialism is a process that encompasses the entire world, arranging semi-colonies to aid and abet the military-industrial-congressional-parliamentary complex.

Local vendor selling goods in Australian military areas. Source: claalna.googlegroups.com (Mailing list).

“STAND UP, DON’T GO BACK / NO ZIONISM IN MY CITY”: The Neocolony

In the 1980s, Malaysia became a non-British state. Yet we were ruled by bourgeois nationalists—an indigenous entrepreneurial class focused on promoting a politically independent, but limited, development of the country. These bourgeois nationalists were served by Malaysia’s fourth Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, a strongman who never had any British leanings. Mahathir converted former British interests into his own, boycotted the UK through the nationwide Buy British Last (BBL) campaign, and opened Malaysia’s “post-colonial” markets to the double penetration of the American Empire and our former fascist rulers, Japan.

Shockingly, this neo-colonial Malaysia is also guilty of perpetuating the Palestinian genocide. Despite calling Hamas “freedom fighters” and shaking hands with martyr Ismail Haniyeh, Malaysia is committed to de-globalizing the Intifada, limiting its reach “from all rivers to all seas.”

A city of golden rain trees (Being together), Taiping is where Malaysia holds political prisoners at the Kamunting Detention Centre, and where the Mahathir government established the existence of a prison. Operation Lalang“Weeding Operation.” Here, the secret police torture prisoners of conscience, interning Yunus Ali and other progressive voices held incommunicado under the Internal Security Act (ISA).

Yunus Ali, an activist from the University of Malaya Students’ Union (UMSU), once fled Malaysia and joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) while in Pakistan. Yunus became a guerrilla fighter in a PLO commando unit led by Yasser Arafat, fighting against Zionist invaders and their Phalangist allies during the Lebanese Civil War. In 1987, the Malaysian regime jailed the pro-Palestinian militant, among many others; and in 2024, they arrested the organizer of a pro-Palestinian grassroots collective, Gegar Amerika, despite having banned Zionist athletes from a Paralympic qualifying event and Zionist-flagged ships from our ports. Imperialism, a structure of domestic and international affairs, coordinates neo-colonies to untie globalized solidarities to benefit settler states.

Australian Army Housing Estate at Lorong Batu Bukit 2, Penang

“WE DON’T WANT TWO STATES / WE WANT ’48”: The Colonist State

Since January 26, 1788, so-called Australia has remained a mass atrocity organized around the continued Nakba of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, a kleptocratic mafia based on stolen lands, waters, airways and generations. Like the marauding Zionist entity, it is controlled by settlers, a reactionary and chauvinistic “breed” of settlers who invade unceded territories, seas, rivers, flora and fauna – and openly terrorize indigenous peoples under siege. On this continent, settlers are currently protected by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a Malaysian Australian who has steadfastly supported genocide the maintenance of the two-state solution of the puppet state of Palestine and the illegitimate Zionist regime — a de facto dissolution of Palestine into one state.

In its commitment to completing the two-state solution to the Palestinian question, Australia normalizes the Palestine partition plan into a genocidal reality in the West Bank and Gaza, and an apartheid state in the rest of occupied Palestine. In the 20th century, “decolonization” meant two-, three-, many-state solutions: a separation of colonial empires, but not the complete destruction of imperial power. Despite, or because of, their nominal independence, new independent political systems of the “Third World” emerged from national liberation struggles as troubled neo-colonies. In the aftermath of “decolonization,” they became spectators or collaborators of the First Nations holocausts, not helpers of the survivors.

What liberation means now is the unfinished business of “decolonization”: the abolition of pipelines, police, prisons, borders, markets, gender, censuses, ombudsmen, the Labor Party, drug prohibition, the Abolitionist Model, two-state solutions, votes in Parliament, and other instruments in the hands of an armed settler state, which are used as weapons against legitimate resistance, and which should be dissolved to restore sovereignty. For human emancipation, for Land Back, settler states must be disarmed, dismantled, delegitimized, negated, destroyed, and replaced, not just “decolonized” like old Penang, Malaysia.

“OUR DAY WILL COME”: The Scream

In Butterworth, in “new Penang,” I grew up playing sports and learning maths near the air base where semi-colonial Malaysia and colonial Australia had slaughtered Vietnam. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Viet Cong victory, I would regularly hear the RAAF flying over football goals and integral calculus at my high school, even years after Vietnam was reunified.

Unlike the airplane in Mrs Dallowaythe RAAF may not have been hovering over my classrooms or canteen, but their aircraft did expose me and other students to loud noise on a regular basis… for extended periods of time. Our education may be Made in Malaysia, but like exposure to radioactive waste from the Australian mining company Lynas in the Malaysian city of Kuantan, our hearing loss will be as Australian-made as the screams of colonised peoples in two, three, many Vietnams, Palestine, Western Sahara, Tamil Eelam, West Papuan, Kanaky, Aboriginal lands.

A cry goes up over the heavens. It is imperialism, and a call to arms against it.

Australian Air Force family in Penang, 1960s-70s

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