A screaming comes across the sky — it is a jet fighter.
The decolonisation of Africa and Asia was a predominantly 20th-century undoing of European colonialism. In 1957, Ghana gained independence from the British Empire. Malayan independence was announced the same year — Merdeka! Freedom! In 1975, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam declared independence. It was 2023, and Palestine —
I was raised in the state of Penang, Malaysia, and studied at a public secondary school in the township of Butterworth. On the mailing list of my high school alumni association, an ex-student once emailed images of “old Penang.” Attached were photographs of the Australian Air Force Base in 1960s–70s Butterworth, when Malaysia became federated and the U.S. waged a crusade against Vietnam, both of which were backed by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). A great purveyor of brutality, the RAAF is pictured starting the engine of a jet fighter manufactured in France and flown in from Australia to massacre the Vietnamese people.
Imperialism is a joint-dictatorship of neo-colonies such as Malaysia, and settler-states such as Australia and the temporary Zionist entity. A highly dynamic system that engineers 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.
“MALAYSIA, USA / HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY?”: The semi-colony
In Malaysia, decolonisation was unfinished business. In the 1960s and 1970s, Malaysia became a British puppet regime, an imperialist experiment. We were ruled by compradors — an indigenous trading class oriented towards 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 received an upper-class British education. Tunku was granted token independence to defend British influence, conserving their domination of our economy.
Disappointingly, this semi-colonial Malaysia was also complicit in the Vietnam War. Despite being recognised by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Malaysia converges with counter-revolution in the “Third World.” A transportation hub for Penang, Butterworth is where the UK mobilised Commonwealth forces for the slaughter of Vietnam, and where the RAAF Transport Flight Vietnam (RTFV) established operations. Here, RTFV members honed their piloting skills, preparing cargo aircrafts assembled in Canada and flown into Malaysia to violently confront Hanoi. A process that encompasses the globe, imperialism arranges semi-colonies to aid and abet the military-industrial-congressional-parliamentary complex.
“RISE UP, DON’T BACK DOWN / NO ZIONISM IN MY TOWN”: The neo-colony
In the 1980s, Malaysia became a non-British polity. Still, we were governed by bourgeois nationalists — an indigenous entrepreneurial class geared towards 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 inclinations towards Britain. Mahathir made former British interests his own, boycotting the UK through the nationwide campaign Buy British Last (BBL) and opening up Malaysia’s “post-colonial” markets to the double penetration of the American Empire and our former fascist rulers, Japan.
Appallingly, this neo-colonial Malaysia is guilty of perpetuating the Palestinian genocide, too. Despite calling Hamas “freedom fighters” and shaking hands with martyr Ismail Haniyeh, Malaysia commits itself to de-globalising the Intifada, limiting its reach “from all rivers to all seas.”
A city of golden rain trees (Samanea saman), Taiping is where Malaysia confines political prisoners in the Kamunting Detention Centre, and where the Mahathir administration brought into existence Operasi Lalang, “Weeding Operation.” Here, the secret police tortures prisoners of conscience, interning Yunus Ali and other progressive voices detained incommunicado under the Internal Security Act (ISA).
A University of Malaya Students’ Union (UMSU) activist, Yunus Ali once fled Malaysia, joining the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) while abroad in Pakistan. Yunus became a guerrilla in a PLO commando unit under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, and fought against Zionist invaders and their Phalangist allies during the Lebanese Civil War. In 1987, the Malaysian regime incarcerated the pro-Palestine militant, among many others; and in 2024, they arrested the organiser of a pro-Palestine grassroots collective, Gegar Amerika, despite banning Zionist athletes from a Paralympic qualifying event and Zionist-flagged ships from our ports. A structure of domestic and international affairs, imperialism coordinates neo-colonies to unlink globalised solidarities to assist settler-states.
“WE DON’T WANT TWO STATES / WE WANT ‘48”: The settler-state
Since 26 January 1788, so-called Australia has remained a mass atrocity organised around the ongoing Nakba of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, a kleptocratic mafia founded on stolen lands, waters, airways, generations. Like the plundering Zionist entity, it is controlled by settlers, a reactionary and chauvinistic “species” of colonists invading unceded territories, seas, rivers, flora and fauna — openly terrorising Indigenous peoples under siege. On this continent, settlers are presently protected by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a Malaysian Australian who accords steadfast support to genocidaires perpetuating the two-state solution of the puppet State of Palestine and the illegitimate Zionist regime — a de facto one-state dissolution of Palestine.
Because it is committed to finalising the two-state solution to the Palestinian question, Australia normalises the partition plan for Palestine into a genocidal reality in the West Bank and Gaza, and an apartheid state in the rest of occupied Palestine. In the 20th century, what “decolonisation” meant was two-, three-, many-state solutions: a separation from colonial empires, though not a complete annulment of imperial power. In spite of, or because of, their nominal independence, newly independent polities of the “Third World” emerged from national liberation struggles as troubled neo-colonies. In the aftermath of “decolonisation,” they became bystanders or collaborators of the holocausts of the First Nations, not helpers of the survivors.
What liberation means now is the unfinished business of “decolonisation”: abolishing pipelines, police, prisons, borders, markets, gender, censuses, ombudsmen, the Labor Party, drug prohibitions, the Abolitionist Model, two-state solutions, voices to Parliament, and other instruments in the hands of an armed settler-state, which are weaponized against justified resistance, and ought to be disbanded to repair sovereignty. For human emancipation, for Land Back, settler-states must be disarmed, defunded, delegitimized, denied, destroyed, and replaced, not just “decolonised” like old Penang, Malaysia.
“OUR DAY WILL COME”: The screaming
In Butterworth, in “new Penang,” I grew up playing sports and learning mathematics near the air base where semi-colonial Malaysia and settler-colonial Australia had butchered Vietnam. In spite of, or because of, the victory of the Viet Cong, I routinely heard the RAAF fly over football goalposts and integral calculus in my secondary school, even years after Vietnamese reunification.
Unlike the aeroplane in Mrs Dalloway, the RAAF did not skywrite over my classrooms and canteen, but their aircrafts did frequently subject me and other students to loud noise … 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 Grown as the screaming of colonised peoples in two, three, many Vietnams, Palestines, Western Saharas, Tamil Eelams, West Papuas, Kanakys, Aboriginal lands.
A screaming comes across the skies. It is imperialism, and a call to arms against it.
