Lives under empire

Imperial subjugation and resistance as depicted in One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed

Amid the dizzying flurry of political news and global affairs developments in 2025, it might be difficult to imagine why we would need more fiction about imperialism, dictatorships, and the manufacturing of consent for forever-wars. After all, doesn’t our own world abound with examples of powerful countries exploiting and extracting from weaker ones, of autocrats (or aspiring ones) extending their tentacles into every aspect of public and private life, of empires lurching from one war to another in attempt to justify their continued existence, and of supposed authority figures and thought leaders falling in line?

Yet this is exactly what we see in the setting that unifies the stories in One Message Remains, a collection of short fiction by Premee Mohamed. The eponymous novella, two novelettes (“The Weight of What is Hollow” and “Forsaking All Others”), and the short story “The General’s Turn” each follow different subjects of the Treotan Empire, a militant dictatorship that has grown habituated to unceasingly waging imperial wars. This format gives Mohamed ample space in which to illustrate the impact of unceasing warfare on the daily lives of imperial subjects. The depth of each story also allows protagonists from diverse walks of life to ponder their relationship with the regime—and whether this relationship needs to change, and at what cost. One Message Remains is a meaningful addition to the body of literary and scholarly works on imperialism and dictatorship, not least because the collection lends clarity to some of the questions that trouble us most: why do political leaders, interested in remaining in power, seek out conflict abroad and repress basic freedoms at home? And why doesn’t the public simply rise up and stop this madness through mass action?

To examine how One Message Remains builds upon this literature, George Orwell’s 1984 is a decent starting point. Readers probably best remember 1984 for Oceania’s mass surveillance, thought-deadening ‘newspeak,’ and boldly contradictory propaganda (“freedom is slavery”). But at least as important to that regime’s grip on power is its incessant warfare. The nationality or identity of the enemy is irrelevant; “Eurasia” and “Eastasia” are fully interchangeable adversaries, assuming the whole conflict isn’t a propagandistic farce. What matters more is that the regime can use these foreign conflicts to redirect public attention from domestic woes and justify something akin to permanent martial law.[1] Expending capital on warfare rather than public welfare keeps the masses immiserated and focused on their day-to-day sustenance alone.

A similar dynamic is hinted at in One Message Remains, especially in “The Weight of What is Hollow,” as the narrative follows a family of artisans who often struggle to procure supplies; their neighbors are worse off, living “like animals” in cramped housing. In the eponymous novella, too, the military officer Tzajos and his company live on meager supplies for daily use even though the army has sophisticated weaponry and sci-fi-style devices for collecting ectoplasm from the remains of fallen soldiers.

I would argue, however, that warfare-as-statecraft as per Orwell is only part of the picture, both in One Message Remains and in our history.

To better understand why warfare is an intractable part of empire, we need to understand empire itself. Fundamentally, the mark of an empire is that an imperial core—a central territory and group of people—sustains and enriches itself by extracting from peripheral lands and peoples, whether these be subdued polities, so-called frontiers, or overseas colonies.[2] Whether the leader of the regime goes by the title of ‘emperor’ is a triviality; the core-periphery hierarchy is what makes an empire.

This is not political dominion for dominion’s sake. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt characterizes European nation-states’ imperial aspirations during the Industrial Era as a response to “business speculation” when “the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion.”[3] To hear it told by the capitalists themselves, Arendt quotes Cecil Rhodes, an English mining magnate-turned-prime minister of the Cape Colony in South Africa:

‘[E]xpansion is everything,’ said Cecil Rhodes, and fell into despair, for every night he saw overhead ‘these stars... these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could.’

Modern imperialism is ultimately a capitalistic enterprise, and capitalism hungers for constant growth.

The Logic of Empire

Of course, the imperium’s hunger for land, or slaves, or oil is hardly motivation enough for the self-sacrifice that warfare and extraction require of its soldiers and subjects. Thus, the regime will rarely be transparent about its motives. Rather, the imperial system is propped up by ideological frames that rationalize and valorize the wants of the core while dehumanizing those living on the periphery. Such rationales are recorded by and embodied in Tzajos in the eponymous novella One Message Remains. As he leads a mission in the recently annexed lands of the Dastian people to catalogue and transport the remains of Dastian soldiers, he describes his unit’s mission as a task of benevolence towards a fallen foe, even likening this to how the “heroes of antiquity” would be merciful towards their fallen foes. (His mission, it turns out, is sacrilegious per Dastian funerary customs and inflames the resistance against the Treotan occupiers.)

Tzajos also views the Dastian people with a patronizing pity as he remarks on how undeveloped their homeland is, how one can travel there for hours at a time “without seeing anything created by human intelligence. Only grass and sky.” Tzajos has internalized one of the most commonplace tenets of imperial thought: land is to be extracted from, and people are to be put to labour—and those who do not realize this potential for capital are necessarily unambitious and undeserving. When the empire enters a “new” land, it assumes that its aims are objective standards for successful statecraft, then subjugates the locals “for their own good” when they don’t meet these imposed standards. The imperial hierarchy rationalizes itself through force and narrative in turn.[4]

Not only may (imposed and exploitative) development be whitewashed as a favour the imperial core is doing for peripheral lands and peoples, but service for the imperial enterprise is framed as something honourable, as making hard choices that lesser people are incapable of. This is readily seen in Orwell’s work—not 1984, but rather his writings based on his time as a reluctant recruit for the British imperial police in Burma (Myanmar). In his short story “Shooting an Elephant,” a younger Orwell feels compelled to shoot a rampaging elephant (spoiler, I suppose), not strictly out of a sense of duty or rationality but because he feels compelled to save face—after previous episodes of humiliation—before the Burmese locals who are watching him. As Orwell puts it, “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

There are several parallels with Tzajos, who feels demeaned by and alienated from the soldiers he commands and consequently over-compensates for his perceived weakness through shows of force against the Dastian locals. Honourable, hard-nosed tenacity is also key to the interiority of General Vessough, the narrator of “The General’s Turn,” who reminds himself there’s honour and dignity in presiding over the regime’s theatrical, game show-like ceremonies-as-executions—and downplays the cruelty that outsiders readily see. Tradition, too, serves as a rationale for carrying out the ceremony. As per the General, “We’ve done it for five hundred years. Three dozen wars.”

Imposing hierarchy, blaming victims, and valorizing violence against those on the periphery all readily lead to dehumanization, thus oiling the gears of the imperial machine. Given prerogatives of enriching the imperial core, any amount of violence against those on the periphery or those to be conquered can be rationalized. In “Forsaking All Others,” one of the narrators, Nana, recounts how living on the Treotan Empire’s frontier meant that her community was subject to scorched-earth tactics, in which the Empire destroys train tracks and puts farms to the torch to prevent their adversary from using these. Earlier in her life, Nana’s parents, many of her kin, and “about half” of her home community were killed when a shell from an unidentified source landed on their temple during a holy day. This is assumed to be the work of a foreign force, but Nana finds it difficult to know with any certainty, knowing only that her people have been deemed acceptable casualties in other parties’ territorial feuds.

Why don’t they just resist?

Faced with the self-serving brutality of empire, observers might wonder why rebellion is not an automatic response. Resistance is not so simple for imperial subjects living on the periphery, of course: for whatever reason they are overtaken in the first place, they are then forced to build the imperial core as labourers and conscripts, at least for as long as the empire is able to keep its iron fist clenched around them. And for all this talk of cores and peripheries, empires are not so neatly divided into a Hunger Games-style Capital and subservient Districts. We might also expect to see resistance among members of the middle class or lower-level bureaucrats, those with greater access to education who nonetheless do not wholly benefit from their membership in the imperial core. Indeed, the leading Party-state of Oceania in 1984 exercises its most stringent surveillance and ideological control against low-ranking Party members.

Controlling the populace is not a simple matter for a state that aims to constantly expand its holdings. Before the modern era, geography and logistics greatly limited empires’ administrative and punitive reach.[5] It has only been from the 20thcentury onward that we have seen true totalitarian regimes emerge, in part because European empires developed methods of repressing dissenters and insurgents in their colonies that they then imported for use against domestic political resistance.[6] Benito Mussolini coined the term totalitario to describe fascist Italy as “all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.”[7] The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany both sought to penetrate all aspects of private and public life, building Party-led organizations that paralleled apparatuses within their respective states but operated outside the rule of law and accountability.[8] These and other states since have tightened their control using secret police forces, who exist alongside conventional, state-run law enforcement but answer to their Party alone and rarely operate in uniform.

What else sets these regimes apart is that whereas other governments chiefly enact violence by way of law enforcement, totalitarian violence “reigns over a completely subdued population” through its unpredictability.[9] The boundaries for acceptable political expression may be suddenly redefined or left deliberately vague;[10] enemies of the Party-state may be recategorized to include new targets for persecution;[11] thuggery and mob violence might be secretly orchestrated by the Party-state;[12] and collective punishment may harm those who were never accused of violating the regime’s laws.[13]These mechanisms of control exist alongside those associated with other dictatorships, such as uncontested[14] single-party rule and bans on critical political expression.

In Mohamed’s Treotan Empire, state terror is carried out through both implicit threats of violence and unsubtle death imagery. The aforementioned execution ritual in “The General’s Turn” is one example; more macabre—and more public—are the gallows constructed from human bones in “The Weight of What is Hollow.” Significantly, bone is not chosen for practical purposes (it needs to be hyper-engineered for structural stability and weathers seasonal changes poorly), but because of how it sparkles with frost in the sun and how it reminds onlookers of the regime’s power over human life.

The regime’s less direct means of intimidation are filtered through Taya’s incomplete perspective (in “The Weight”), as she lacks insight into the inner operations of the Treotan state. But there is much that she, and reader, can infer. Expectations for public order and carrying out the regime’s directives are rarely stated directly, yet Taya’s family—artisans who craft the bone-gallows—are acutely aware of the consequences of failure or non-compliance. After a design flaw drags out one prisoner’s execution, Taya is conflicted over whether to design gallows that would make subsequent victims suffer less—in spite of the overseeing officials’ hinted preferences for something more sadistic. She argues with her aunt while drafting plans for the next gallows, but her grandfather warns her that it might be other family members who are in danger if she does not comply with the officials’ wishes:

‘It won’t be you they come after, it won’t be her. It’s a waste. Sound of it, it’ll be Rupaj—him they can spare—or their kid. Vil. Her because she’s one of the few kids left, so that’ll be a blow to us all, even if she never builds a thing.’

Taya has little reason to doubt this. Elsewhere in the story, it’s suggested that she lacks a frame of reference for anything other than totalitarian rule. One day, she “begins” to see anti-war protestors gathering on street corners (and then vanishing “like mice”), suggesting that even mild political demonstrations are an uncommon sight and have been banned for a long while. And late into her ordeal with redesigning the bone-gallows under duress, she wonders to herself:

Was it normal, did other people feel this way, did every subject of every empire go to sleep at night thinking I am afraid of the people who run my country, did they think I fear my state?

Participation in, and assent to, state terror

Empires, especially totalitarian ones, use violence to control their populaces. But state terror must be carried out by human actors, and terror alone may give the public little reason to obey if the violence will continue regardless.

Those willing to carry out the Party-state’s violence are often assumed to be its most fanatical subjects. Yet Hannah Arendt, after observing the trial of Nazi collaborator Adolf Eichmann in Israel, devised her now-famous notion of “the banality of evil.” Namely, the accomplices to totalitarian rule less resemble fanatics for a cause than efficiency-minded, self-interested employees for what happens to be a merciless organization.[15] This perspective is validated through Tzajos’s obsession with adherence to protocols and a rigid chain of command. It’s highlighted, too, in “The Weight of What is Hollow” as Auntie Lasidu insists on fulfilling the regime’s requests “in any way we are told,” and as tense family arguments are interspersed with dry excerpts from an instruction manual-in-progress for the design of the bone-gallows.

The case of Taya’s family becomes more nuanced, however, when Taya visits her grandfather and learns about her family’s history. As he tells it, the vesine trees from which they harvest their resin are remnants of the “old country” from before the Treotan Empire “rolled over us,” sparing only those who did not resist. He goes on to explain that the Treotan overlords “never had the touch” for their family’s artisanship and thus found it useful to spare them. Thanks to their unique place in the regime, Taya’s family enjoys a modest income, has a separate bedroom for each member, and even eats at a hotel restaurant once the payment is delivered for the bone-gallows Taya has designed. While Taya’s aunt and grandfather do rationalize their roles, they are also cognizant of their status as a colonized people and can intelligently discuss whether or how it is safe to contravene the regime’s directives.

The banality of evil has limited explanatory power here, though. Rather, we can turn to Frantz Fanon’s writings about “colonized intellectuals” such as those in French-occupied Algeria. Fanon himself was born into a Black middle-class family in French-occupied Martinique; during his assignment as a psychiatrist to a hospital in Algeria during the war for independence there, he “soon found sympathy for the rebels,”[16] resigned from his post, and joined the fugitive Algerian resistance forces in Tunisia. From this perspective, he characterizes a subclass of colonial subjects—intellectuals, “artisans, and small shop-keepers,” among others[17]—as potentially sympathizing with de-colonial movements yet having “special interests at heart”[18] in the existing colonial order and being “permeated by colonialism and all its ways of thinking” by way of their formal education.[19] As a colonial regime assimilates subordinate peoples, it also creates among them a colonized subclass who benefit from the system as-is and may be reluctant to oppose it. Families like Taya’s reflect this reality well.

The possibility of freedom

In speculative fiction, the imperium often functions simply as an antagonist for protagonists to topple. Certainly, a closed narrative in which the oppressor looms ever darker over protagonists, and then falls, gives readers the tidy plot resolution that many are accustomed to. If anything, this type of closure may be desired now more than ever: wealth inequality and extraction from our only Earth escalate, and the promised “end of history”—in which all the world’s people eventually throw off the chains of autocracy—is nowhere in sight. Small wonder, then, that a growing number of readers of speculative fiction are fond of quoting Ursula K. Le Guin:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

And there is some sense in this line of thought. As much as history’s empires had refined their means of maintaining political control, each eventually came to an end, even the ones of the early-mid 20th century. Still, it could be a mistake to assume that human history progresses linearly, inevitably, towards freedom. The outcome of World War II was not at all certain; the fall of the Soviet Union took observers by surprise at the time; political scientists and pro-democracy activists have repeatedly seen their predictions of the Chinese Communist Party’s demise fall flat. And these days, liberal democracies frequently make scapegoats of their most vulnerable minorities or backslide towards authoritarianism altogether.

Amid these historical uncertainties, the fact that the stories in One Message Remains are written as a series of vignettes and not as a neat progression towards the fall of the Treotan Empire is a strength of the collection’s writing. Each story follows a protagonist who, regardless of their initial orientation towards the Empire, is forced to reckon with their role in the regime. Not one of them leads the sort of insurgency that might better satisfy readers, yet all of them find ways to resist or defy orders in their own capacity. The gears of the imperial machine keep turning, yes, but as the Empire persists with its warmaking and repression, it may yet find itself over-extended as these acts of resistance, though small at first, undermine its enterprise. Readers do not have hope spoon-fed to them, but they are at least given space in which to ponder it.

Orwell was pessimistic that totalitarian rule could ever be overcome, yet other authors have differed. Arendt argued that “the nation-state is least suited for unlimited growth because the genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely.”[20] Fanon wrote that no colonial power was “capable of adopting the only form of contest which has a chance of succeeding, namely, the prolonged establishment of large forces of occupation.”[21] (The imperium’s power, though vast, is not insurpassable; the very act of suppressing resistance on the periphery exhausts its own strength.) And Wendy Cheng, who recently wrote about the repression of Taiwanese student activists by Taiwan’s Cold War-era single-party regime, said that “hegemony is never stable and always contested.”[22] It is proper to wonder whether those with conscience are too small and too few to oppose vast systems of oppression, as Orwell did. But if Fanon and Arendt are right, then perhaps all exploitative regimes exist on borrowed time; perhaps the quiet resistance of Taya and like-minded subjects of the Treotan Empire can someday shift history’s course.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1951. (1962, 2nd edition.) The Origins of Totalitarianism. Meridian Books.

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” The New Yorker.

Babic, Milan. 2020. “Let’s talk about the interregnum: Gramsci and the crisis of the liberal international order.” International Affairs 96 (3): 767-786. DOI: 10.1093/ia/iiz254.

Cheng, Wendy. 2023. Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism. University of Washington Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Mohamed, Premee. 2025. One Message Remains. Psychopomp.

Ong, Lynette H. 2018. “Thugs and Outsourcing of State Repression in China.” The China Journal 80:17.

Orwell, George. 1936. “Shooting an elephant.” New Writing issue 2. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/shooting-an-elephant/.

Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. Secker and Warburg.

Further Reading

On imperialist/colonialist core-periphery power structures:

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1999. “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.” Theory, Culture & Society 16 (1): 41–58, 1999. DOI: 10.1177/026327699016001003.

Césaire, Aimé. 1955 [1972]. Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on Colonialism]. Présence africaine [trans. By Joan Pinkham, Monthly Review Press]. https://archive.org/details/discourse-on-colonialism.

Dos Santos, Theotonio. 1970. “The Structure of Dependence.” The American Economic Review 60(2):231–36.

Fanon, Frantz. 1952. (Translated 1967.) Black Skin, White Masks [Peau noire, masques blancs]. Éditions du Seuil; Grove Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2020. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Belknap Press.

Moradi, Fazil. 2023. “In search of decolonised political futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native.” Anthropological Theory 23 (4): 355-372. DOI: 10.1177/14634996231209104.

Orwell, George. 1934. Burmese Days. Harper & Brothers.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

Said, Edward. 1985. “Orientalism reconsidered.” Cultural Critique 1: 89-107. DOI: 10.2307/1354282.

Woodman, Conor. 2020. “The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis.” Verso Books. https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/4383-the-imperial-boomerang-how-colonial-methods-of-repression-migrate-back-to-the-metropolis.

On totalitarianism and authoritarianism:

Cheng, Tun-jen. 1989. “Democratizing the Quasi-Leninist Regime in Taiwan.” World Politics 41 (4): 471–99. DOI: 10.2307/2010527.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. (Republished 2000.) Leviathan. Intelex: Past Masters Full Text Humanities.

Lemon, Edward, Bradley Jardine, and Natalie Hall. 2022. “Globalizing Minority Persecution: China’s Transnational Repression of the Uyghurs.” Globalizations 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2022.2135944.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2020. “The New Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 31 (1): 51–65. DOI: 10.1353/jod.2020.0004.

Orwell, George. 1941. (Republished 2013.) “‘For what am I fighting?’: George Orwell on Arthur Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon’.” The New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/01/what-am-i-fighting-george-orwell-arthur-koestlers-darkness-noon.

Thompson, Mark R. 2019. Authoritarian Modernism in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan US.

Zhong, Rui. February 2025. “Transnational repression and you: An American’s 2025 guide.” https://ko-fi.com/post/Transnational-Repression-and-You-An-Americans-20-W7W81B8O4S.

Eric de Roulet is an interdisciplinary PhD student based in BC, Canada, specifically in the unceded traditional land of the Syilx Okanagan people. While he is professionally a social science researcher and instructor, he also keeps busy as a reviewer and aspiring author of fiction, not to mention as something of a summer camp counselor for two too-clever cats.

Notes

[1] This is an extreme example of how regimes manufacture consent, i.e., how they use their dominance over public discourse to generate support for their imperial ventures. But real-world examples abound, from the construction of new enemies for the so-called War on Terror, to Nazi Germany’s claims of ethnic Germans being persecuted in the Sudetenland and western Poland, to Putin’s Russia claiming to undertake a “de-Nazification” of Ukraine (which is led by a Jewish Ukrainian president) despite antisemitism being more widespread in Russia.

[2] Historian Bret Devereaux provide as a similar overview of imperialism on his blog post “Collections: Why are there no empires in Age of Empires?”, but the idea is considerably older.

[3] Arendt 1962, 125-126.

[4] British art from the 18th and 19th centuries frequently depicted Britain as a weary elder looking after unruly, childlike children; France designated parts of Algeria as French departments, supposedly to civilize them. It is not coincidental, either, that theories of scientific racism (the pseudoscientific classification of people into races with supposedly immutable qualities) gained popular acceptance as European powers and White settler states sought to rationalize their exploitation of other peoples.

[5] For instance, China’s dynasties, though despotic, likely had minimal control over the routine affairs of the peasantry in practice. Early 20th-century Chinese scholars such as Hu Shih and Lin Yutang had already observed that rural Chinese villages were nearly self-ruled, save for conscription and visits by tax collectors.

[6] This phenomenon is termed the ‘imperial boomerang,’ based on an English translation of Martinican author and social critic Aimé Césaire’s writings on the concept (Discours sur le colonialism/Discourse on Colonialism, 1950) and subsequently popularized by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. See Woodman (2020) for a more detailed overview.

[7] Encyclopedia Brittanica. “Totalitarianism.”

[8] Both the German and Russian empires were brought down by workers’ revolutions shortly after World War I, yet the Nazi and Soviet regimes re-adopted the former empires’ expansionist aims and methods.

[9] Arendt 1962, p. 345.

[10] Censorship laws in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), also imposed on Hong Kong, ban “collusion with foreign forces” and other actions that “harm national security” without defining what those actions are. In the West, “terrorism” and “terrorist” are constantly malleable labels.

[11] As seen in Nazi Germany (per Niemöller’s poem “First They Came”), China’s Cultural Revolution (the ever-shifting “black categories” of suspected dissidents), and US discourse regarding which groups of immigrants are worthy members of society.

[12] As happens in the PRC (Ong 2018), but secret police forces the world over blur the boundary between unidentified thugs and law enforcement agents.

[13] Arendt 1962, 345. Collective punishment is commonplace in crackdowns on anti-colonial political activities and in regimes’ transnational repression of emigrants.

[14] Alternatively, some regimes practice competitive authoritarianism, officially holding elections while persecuting opposition and tilting the electoral playing field so much as to make an opposition-party victory effectively impossible. (See the Further Reading list.)

[15] Arendt 1963.

[16] Fanon 1963, p. 317.

[17] Fanon 1963, p. 60.

[18] Fanon 1963, p. 60.

[19] Fanon 1963. P. 45.

[20] Arendt 1962, p. 126. I will note that the nation-state governing model remains commonplace in the present-day international political order.

[21] Fanon 1963, p. 74.

[22] Cheng 2023, Introduction.