Aimé Césaire's "Boomerang Effect" and the 1970 October Crisis in the Global Cold War.

This article re-examines the 1970 October Crisis in Canada through the lens of Martinican anti-colonial intellectual Aimé Césaire's theory of the "boomerang effect," which posits that the violence used to maintain colonialism abroad eventually normalizes state violence against a colonizer's own citizens. The article focuses on the Canadian government's invocation of the War Measures Act in response to the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), a Québec nationalist group ideologically linked to global anti-imperialist movements, framing the FLQ's actions as an existential threat that justified extraordinary state violence. By situating the October Crisis within the broader Cold War context of global anti-imperial resistance and state repression, the article highlights how Canada's settler-colonial history and Cold War alliances contributed to the normalization and justification of violence against its own population. This perspective expands understanding of the October Crisis by connecting Canadian domestic policy to international patterns of state responses to anti-imperialism during the 20th century.