A wounded man is held at gunpoint by British forces in Malaya. Photo: Ministry of Information.
By Fadiah Nadwa Fikri – Nov 17, 2025
In July this year, members of Parliament in the United Kingdom voted overwhelmingly to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. To enable this proscription, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper tabled a draft order to amend the Terrorism Act 2000 in the House of Commons, where it passed by a vote of 385 to 26. This move was made days after the organisation’s actionists broke into RAF Brize Norton, the largest Royal Air Force station in Oxfordshire, and sprayed red paint onto the turbine engines of two military planes, resulting in losses worth millions of pounds, according to police.
Some citizens of the United Kingdom have expressed shock and dismay that the country, as they put it, has become “unrecognisable” and “authoritarian”, revealing their illusion that it was built on the idea of freedom, as the police continue to conduct mass arrests of protesters for holding placards in support of Palestine Action. These reactions, although well-intentioned, obscure the historical fact that the British Empire was built on colonial conquests anchored in mass violence—slavery, the genocides of Indigenous peoples, and the suppression of national liberation movements—enacted against what Frantz Fanon called the “damned of the earth” all over the colonised world for centuries.
The repressive measures unleashed on Palestine Action and its supporters, therefore, are not an aberration from the norm or “un-British” but rather a testament to Britain’s true imperialist nature: its enduring need to sustain its existence through repressive counter-insurgency strategies. The employment of these strategies has enabled it to play an active role, alongside the United States, in maintaining the Zionist project it devised in Palestine in 1917 through the issuance of the Balfour Declaration. The creation of the Jewish ethnostate of Israel in 1948 further reinforced this racialised, colonial project. This project served to construct, as the first British governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, stated, “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”—an embodiment of what the Syrian-Palestinian academic and diplomat Fayez Sayegh described as “[r]eciprocal interests” that “had thus come to bind British imperialism and Zionist colonialism”.
To understand the centrality of counter-insurgency technology to the survival of British imperialism, it is imperative to examine its historical roots – how it was used to entrench British imperialism in Southeast Asia after the Second World War, through the creation of a neocolonial Malay ethnostate in 1957 in Malaya, with the deliberate exclusion of Singapore, serves as a crucial frame of reference. The creation of this ethnostate, governed by a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy deeply entwined with the racial ideology of Malay supremacy—whose ideological basis lay in the racial supremacist ideology of white supremacy—concurrently facilitated the rise of US imperialism in the region.
Following Britain’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan in the Second World War, there arose a necessity to restore its Great Power status and rebuild its imperial dominance by reconfiguring its foothold in Southeast Asia. To achieve this, the colonial state abandoned the system of indirect rule, which had been in place in Malaya since 1874, until its defeat in 1942 upon its recolonisation of the country in 1945, and replaced it with direct rule grounded in the ideology of liberalism. As Louis Mountbatten, the then Supreme Allied Commander of Southeast Asia Command, noted:
“…[I]t must be the policy of the Military Administration to exercise its powers and discharge its responsibilities, in so far as this may prove possible, with the cooperation and support of the local population … The more the people themselves can be associated with the mechanism of government, the more successful and effective it will be. It is therefore my direction that a liberal and enlightened policy shall be followed by the Military Administration.”
It is worth noting that Malaya was the “dollar arsenal” of the sterling area, in other words, the largest dollar earner in the British Commonwealth, due to its lucrative rubber and tin production, which was powered by the super-exploitation of indentured labourers brought from India and China to fund the British welfare state. It did not take long for the liberal mask to slip, laying bare the true face of the ideology. In warning that he would bring the full force of the law against workers who intended to carry out strike actions and labelling their resistance as an act meant to foment “civil disturbances”, arouse “hatred of the Administration” and impede “the just processes of the law”, Mountbatten stressed:
The administration will use its full power to suppress actions of this kind, from whatever quarter they may come. Persons guilty of such conduct will be arrested and prosecuted and, if aliens, may be repatriated to the country of their birth or citizenship.
Given the urgency of resuming the colonial project of capital accumulation, which was necessary for rebuilding and sustaining the British Empire in the postwar world, the “curtailment of liberties”, as Donna Amoroso observed, was “most clear-cut and unapologetic when applied to labour activity”. The British also took measures to tighten legislation related to associations. In early March 1946, civil affairs officers began revising the Registration of Societies law for the use of the civil government. Under the revised law, organisations would no longer be deemed “legal unless declared otherwise”, and in the event the laws governing societies were rendered ineffective, sedition and banishment laws would be applied.
Another aspect of the above-mentioned counter-insurgency strategy was the use of the racialised narrative of communist control or communist influence. The British perpetuated this narrative to create a political division between the communists—some of whom were Malays and Muslims and active members of the left-wing Malay nationalist organisations, whose members were Muslims—and other non-Malay actors within the same coalition, all of whom were striving to realise a shared goal: the attainment of complete independence for Malaya, inclusive of Singapore, which would pave the way for the establishment of a nation that would uphold both political and economic sovereignty through redistribution of wealth and reorganisation of society—a nation-building project that was fundamentally anticapitalist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist.
This political division, as a colonial strategy, has deep historical roots. It was sown by the British colonial state within Malaya’s heavily racialised multi-ethnic society to delegitimise the radical anticolonial movement by creating suspicions not only among the general population but also among the movement’s diverse members, composed of Malay Muslims and non-Malays; the Malay Left and the non-Malay Left. These suspicions revolved around the genuineness of the movement⎯specifically, that it was “communist” or interchangeably “Chinese” in nature, and therefore barred from making a legitimate claim to nationhood in Malaya, a nation that the British described as “the Malays’ only home, and that does not necessarily apply to any of the other races who occupy the peninsula, or to people who live in it for a shorter or a longer time”.
This framing echoed that of their ally, the right-wing United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) comprising Malay aristocrats, whose aim⎯since its opposition to the Malayan Union plan (a constitutional scheme that would embody a unified system of administration under a strong central government)⎯had been to reestablish the principle that sovereignty lay with the Malay rulers⎯who claimed to be the shadow of God on Earth and the protector of Islam⎯and that Malaya was a Malay state. As Amrita Malhi shows in her study, which draws on historical geographer Gary Fields’s conception of “enclosure” in occupied Palestine,⎯the British deployed similar techniques of enclosure to enact persecution of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) through the violent counter-insurgency war, which the British called the “Emergency”, waged from 1948 to 1960.
Trump Visit Met by Popular Protests in Malaysia Over US Backing of Israel
Serving as an enclosure, the Emergency, “enclosed and bounded the space assigned to national politics to exclude the MCP, operating as a process of intellectual boundary production”. Its function was to “engineer a specific transition to independence”, which entailed the management, suppression, and elimination of opposition to that endeavour. Highlighting the racialised aspect of the enclosure⎯specifically in the case of Malay Muslim communist leader Abdullah C. D.’s ideas and the MCP’s communism, which the Emergency “strongly associated with ‘Chineseness’”⎯she observes how the enclosure used race to encircle both territorial and ideological spaces that it deemed “legitimate” national politics: an arena dominated by UMNO.
This led to the creation of a power system that reinforced the racial order, thereby positioning Malaya as a Southeast Asian bulwark against communism. As the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Creech Jones, affirmed, the success of the British counter-insurgency war was “a vital step in the ‘Cold War’ against communism in the East”. Specifically, creating a political division among members of the anticolonial resistance by portraying them as purveyors of violence provided the British with a pretext of criminality, thus justifying the use of repressive measures against them. An illustration of this point is the instruction issued by the Colonial Office’s Assistant Secretary of State, J. D. Higham, during the Emergency, in which he ordered that colonial officials refer to the communists as “bandits” in public statements. The instruction further stated that “On no account should the term ‘insurgent’, which might suggest a genuine popular uprising, be used”. Similarly, in a special conference on communism in Malaya and Singapore, the British colonial state stressed that the communist struggle against colonialism did not equate to a nationalist struggle for independence.
As regards the vilification of the Malay Left, whose members were Muslims, a British Brigadier stated that a Malay whom he considered a “terrorist” was worth “seven to eight Chinese” due not only to the physical threat they posed to the colonial state but also to the hegemony engendered by the British-UMNO alliance. In reinforcing the claim of “communist influence” on the Malay left, a British intelligence report asserted that the left-wing Malay Nationalist Party (MNP) was collaborating with Moscow and waiting for “the day” when a third world war would break out, thereby making Malaya’s complete independence possible.
This act of delegitimisation perpetrated by the British, amplified by their collaborator and right-wing media organisations, entailed portraying the political actors involved in the anticolonial movements as either irrational, deviant, disgruntled, unpopular, violent, bandits, extremists, terrorists, traitors, disloyal, or unrepresentative of the Malayan masses or specific ethnic groups⎯in the case of Malaya, the Malay Muslim population. These portrayals constituted different iterations of the colonial myth of the “uncivilised savages” used by the coloniser to dehumanise those who resisted them to justify their “civilising mission”, in other words, their continued presence in Malaya to be, as they claimed, the “protector” of the Malay community. It is essential to highlight that this strategy continues to be enacted today against the Palestinian armed resistance groups and radical movements that aim to disrupt imperialist accumulation and expansion of capital through warfare.
Aware of the danger of this political division, which was part and parcel of the old colonial playbook, the chairman of Malaya’s first multi-ethnic united front known as the PUTERA-AMCJA coalition—which comprised Malay and non-Malay organisations whose members were nationalists, Islamists, communists, women, youths, peasants, and workers—and president of the MNP, Ishak Haji Mohamad (popularly known as Pak Sako), warned the delegates of the coalition at their annual conference in April 1948 in Singapore that the same strategy was being employed by the British against them at the time through their mouthpiece, The Straits Times. He averred:
Their attempts to split our democratic front in Malaya by distortion, blackmail, and insinuation have already begun. Recently, the local reactionary English press published a report purporting to come from its Penang correspondent that a merger is now underway between the Malay left wing—that is, the MNP—and the Malay right wing, the UMNO. This is one example of imperialist distortion of news calculated to sow seeds of discord among the democratic forces”.
This astute analysis of the anti-communist propaganda offered by Ishak illustrated his critical consciousness of how that propaganda⎯, which was conspicuously racialised,⎯was constitutive of broader British psychological warfare⎯, a form of epistemic violence⎯whose purpose was to maintain the colonial state’s hegemony. In Malaya, anti-communist propaganda was systematically coordinated by the Information and Research Department (IRD), established in early 1948. This top-secret, semi-autonomous unit, attached to the British Foreign Office and located in Singapore, soon became, as Phillip Deery notes, “the key instrument in Britain’s clandestine ideological offensive against the Soviet Union during the Cold War”. In dissecting the workings of the IRD in Malaya, Deery highlights that the unit’s propagandists (speechwriters, broadcasters, journalists, and politicians) used “both ‘black’ propaganda—strategically placed lies and false rumours—and ‘grey’ propaganda, whereby deliberately slanted, non-attributable information was produced and disseminated to influential elites at home and abroad”, or in other words, distortion. In addition to distortion, the propagandists also used language to frame anti-communist propaganda. As the Memorandum on the Use of Words in Publicity about Communists emphasised:
The persistent use of particular words or phrases to convey a meaning is an elementary step in any organised publicity. In the present battle for world opinion … it is essential that we should recourse to this technique.
The political division sown by the British and their collaborator UMNO, which served to marginalise the communists from the rest and vice versa within Malaya’s national boundaries, consequently obscured their legitimate political aims⎯or, in other words, the substance of their struggle. This obstructed the masses from seeing with clarity the material reality that gave rise to that struggle⎯the workings of colonialism and other interlocking systems of domination such as racism, capitalism, and imperialism and the urgent need to bring about the unity of the colonised not only within the national boundaries but also in other parts of the world⎯the colonised whose dehumanisation was enacted by the same systems of domination.
Thus, masking the material reality of colonial rule and the urgency of the struggle against it became an urgent necessity for the British colonial state. It became inevitable given the emergence of numerous political activities carried out by Malaya’s national liberation movement aimed at building not only national anticolonial solidarity, but also transnational anticolonial solidarity founded on the idea of joint struggle, which emphasised the centrality of forging a path towards unity with other colonised peoples whose struggles were bound up with theirs; colonised peoples who shared not only the same suffering under the yoke of colonialism but also the same will to liberate themselves from that colonial yoke, both of which would strengthen the fight against the imperial-capitalist machine on the national and international planes. Their liberation struggle embodied the essence of the words of the Palestinian revolutionary martyr Ghassan Kanafani on the indivisibility of internationalism and the national liberation struggle:
Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution … The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.
The anxiety that the national liberation movement in Malaya⎯, which was intrinsically multi-ethnic and internationalist,⎯engendered in the British colonial state was evident in its constant surveillance of the political actors involved in those activities. To obliterate the movement, it waged a violent counter-insurgency war⎯cloaked as the “Emergency” to avoid British businesses’ insurance policies from getting invalidated⎯in June 1948. It is worth reminding that the policing at the heart of this counter-insurgency war, which lasted until 1960, was exported to Malaya after the British mandate concluded in Palestine in May 1948. As Georgina Sinclair observes, the recurring emergencies in Palestine elevated its policing practices to a model for the British Empire, positioning it as an essential laboratory for cultivating leadership within colonial police forces. This imperialist war saw the first use of a herbicide that contained the deadly contaminant dioxin, similar to what became Agent Orange, as part of the scorched earth policy; concentration camps; and mutilation of dead bodies, among others, aimed at decimating the national liberation movement in Malaya and the broader Southeast Asian region.
While Palestine Action UK prisoners languish behind bars, and their comrades in the United States, Italy, Australia, Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands risk their lives to continue dismantling the Western imperialist war machine—an act of solidarity necessary for breathing life into the idea of joint struggle for liberation—there have emerged voices among UK progressives, who are both white and non-white UK citizens, regurgitating the very imperialist propaganda about anti-imperialist struggles. They went so far as to openly glorify the Empire’s “benevolence” and advocate forging alliances with white supremacists, whose racial ideology provided the basis for the creation of similar ideologies as a colonial technology of power for the maintenance of imperial-capitalist hegemony in countries like Malaya, India, and occupied Palestine, and which for centuries has been used to inflict unimaginable terror and death on oppressed peoples the world over, including the very people these progressives claim to stand for. If this position stems from ignorance, the words of James Baldwin remain a stark reminder:
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
Fadiah Nadwa Fikri is a lawyer and scholar of Southeast Asian Studies. Her work examines the intellectual history of decolonisation, Malay radical politics, and the British racialising project, with a focus on Malaya and Singapore.
