Thoughts on “Decolonization” as an Anti-White Discourse
Andrew Joyce • November 10, 2017 Take up the White Man’s burden
And reap his old reward,
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard
Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden
Along
with ‘Whiteness Studies’ and ‘Black Lives Matter,’ the concept of
‘decolonization’ is currently rampant in Western institutions of higher
education. In the most recent example,
academics at England’s University of Cambridge are considering how to
implement a call from a small group of Black and leftist undergraduates
to “decolonize” its English literature syllabus by taking in more Black
and ethnic minority writers and bringing ‘post-colonial thought’ (a
branch of critical theory) to its existing curriculum. Seen in the
context of similar agitation at Yale last year, ongoing “Rhodes Must Fall” agitation in South Africa, the removal of portraits of White founders from King’s College London, and attacks on statues
of prominent White historical figures in the United States, the
‘decolonization’ effort is clearly part of an escalating craze for
removing White presence and reducing White space throughout the West.
This reduction of White space is occurring in demographic, cultural, and
even historical areas; the latter involving a ludicrous ‘Blackwashing’
of periods of European history which were overwhelmingly monocultural,
with gross exaggerations of non-White presence in places like Roman Britain.
Today,
White nations are being demonstrably colonized by non-Whites, White
culture is increasingly marginalized (or dismissed as non-existent), and
White history is being rewritten to support and advance the agenda of
contemporary multiculturalism. Whites are thus abused as colonizers
while simultaneously being subjected to an unprecedented and
multifaceted colonization. This jarring incongruence between rhetoric
and reality requires an interrogation of what is meant by terms like
“colonize,” “empire,” and even “genocide,” particularly in regard to the
political uses they have come to acquire, and also an interrogation of
what we understand by historical processes of colonization. It is argued
here that the growing clamor for ‘decolonization,’ like Whiteness
studies, exists only to encourage and facilitate an aggressive
anti-White discourse.
Several
years ago I had the opportunity to attend a conference on ‘genocide
studies,’ during which I was introduced to the work of the leading
academic in this field, the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses. Despite
his last name (which apparently is also English and Welsh as well as
Jewish), Moses evidences no discernible Jewish ancestry, his father John
Moses being a notable Anglican priest and his mother Ingrid a
full-blooded German from Lower Saxony. Moses has built his career around
broad explorations of the themes of colonialism and genocide, and the
relationship between the two. Although he wasn’t present at this
particular conference, I was very much interested in those presentations
concerning his work, which I have since come to regard as being
generally of a very high quality and, most importantly, wide-ranging and
devoid of the mawkish (not to mention mendacious) moralism that often
saturates Jewish academic treatments of these themes. To my mind Moses
remains one of the most essential writers on colonialism, conquest and
genocide as perennial features of the human existence, and I would have a
difficult time engaging in discussion on these subjects with someone
unfamiliar with his work. Importantly, Moses argues that terms like
“colonization” have fluid rather than fixed definitions, especially in
their discursive usage, and stresses that the meaning of such terms as
“colonization” and “imperialism” have rather been adapted in recent
decades in order to facilitate a political agenda — to condemn European
nations and to question Western moral legitimacy.
For example, in his introduction to Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (2008),
Moses contends that conquest and occupation are human universals rather
than the preserve of uniquely evil European peoples and their culture.
He writes that “‘Empire,’ ‘colony,’ and ‘genocide’ are keywords
particularly laden with controversial connotations,” but that “few are
the societies that were not once part of empires, whether its core or
periphery. Few are the societies that were not the product of a
colonization process, whether haphazard or planned.”[1]
Despite the universal presence of conquest, displacement, and
domination in human history, Moses notes that the usage of the
terminology of these themes has come to focus inordinately on the recent
European past:
‘Empire’ and ‘colony’ are viewed through exclusively nineteenth- and twentieth-century lenses and have become words of implicit opprobrium because they connote European domination of the non-European world. … ‘Imperialism’ was coined in the middle of the nineteenth century to criticize ambitions for domination and expansion. A century later, to accuse a country of colonialism was to condemn it for enslaving and exploiting another.[2]
When
utilizing these keywords then, modern ethnic activists strategically
take the European expansionism of the nineteenth century as their
starting point, excluding many prior centuries during which non-White
participation in conquest, slavery, expansion, and imperialism was at
least equally in evidence. Colonialism has thus ceased to be regarded in
modern social and academic discourse as a human universal, easily
explained by evolutionary impulses, and has instead come to be regarded
as a dynamic in which uniquely exploitative Whites disturb the
putatively utopian existence of non-Whites (a myth bolstered and
promoted by Boasian anthropology),
before subjecting them to unimaginably horrific treatment. Because of
the lop-sided nature of contemporary discourse on colonialism and
empire, Moses notes that nothing less than “the moral legitimacy of
Western civilization is at stake” when defining and utilizing these
keywords.[3]
One
of the most interesting, and frustrating, aspects of this questioning
of Western moral legitimacy is that Whites have allowed themselves to be
subjected to it, sometimes even encouraging it. On some levels it would
be comforting to attribute this self-flagellation exclusively to very
recent alien influences, but the truth is more complex. Europeans may
have had unprecedented success in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
in expanding their spheres of material interest and cultural influence,
but they also engaged in an unprecedented level of self-critique
because of it. Moses suggests that White participation or co-operation
in the questioning of the moral legitimacy of Western civilization is in
part a “culmination of a long tradition of European legal and political
critique of colonization and empire. … European theologians,
philosophers and lawyers have been debating the morality of occupation
since the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century.”[4]
This
“long tradition of European legal and political critique of
colonization and empire” could be read as evidence in support of Kevin
MacDonald’s theory of ‘pathological altruism’
in European society, or the idea that Europeans have uniquely
constructed their societies to place extreme emphasis on moral
conformity and the rights of the individual. Whites (and the legitimacy
of their civilization) are thus especially vulnerable in modern
discussions of colonization, slavery, and empire, not because their
actions in these areas were particularly nefarious, but because they are
the only successful ethnic group in these spheres willing to subject
itself to such a critique, not only by others within the ethnic group,
but also by ethnic outsiders claiming moral superiority. Perhaps best
encapsulated in Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden“(1899),
written in response to the Philippine-American War, the European
experience of expansion and empire has always been double-sided,
combining a love of exploration and glory with uneasy introspection
prompted, as Kipling put it, by “the judgment of your peers.” It is
particularly telling that in the course of hundreds of conversations
with figures at all levels of the Alt Right (according to all media
hype, a bastion of aggressive ethnic chauvinism), I have yet to come
across a single individual advocating an expansionist or colonial policy
— the preferred option being a total segregation from non-Whites and a
policy of non-interference in their affairs.
Of
course, one of the main reasons for our contemporary aversion to
colonialism is that the collapse of empire has been catastrophic for us
as a people — not in terms of lost resources, but because we immediately
became subject to reverse colonization. Although accelerated by hostile
alien influences, it remains indisputable that Europeans conducted
their empires, particularly in their latter bureaucratic stages, in
accordance with the principle that the colonized acquired a status
nominally indistinct from each other as well as the conquering
national/ethnic group. As Enoch Powell expressed it in relation to the
British empire:
From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, notwithstanding the loss of the American colonies, there occurred a striking expansion outside the United Kingdom of the dominions of the Crown, until those born within a quarter of the land surface of the globe were born within the allegiance, and were subsequently British subjects undistinguishable from one another in the law of the United Kingdom.[5]
In
Britain, this led to an initial mass influx of non-Whites from the
colonies between the passage of the British Nationality Act (1948),
which defined British citizenship in accordance with the principle
outlined by Powell, and the Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962), which
only moderately slowed the tide. An almost identical scenario played out in France between
1945 and 1974, and in the Netherlands, which took in, between 1945 and
1990, around 730,000 migrants from the former Dutch colonies of
Indonesia, Surinam, and the Dutch Antilles. It should be stated that the
principles outlined by Powell were almost certainly always intended to
remain just that — principles, but the vulnerability was nonetheless
made available for exploitation in the form of mass non-White adoption
of European citizenships. A similar vulnerability of principle may be
observed in the jus soli interpretation of citizenship employed by the United States, which has been equally subjected to countless exploitations.
Another
reason why even ethnocentric Whites have developed a strong aversion to
colonial ambitions is that our culture has intensively absorbed and
internalized the anti-imperialism of leftist intellectuals like Sartre
and Fanon, for whom all empires (excluding of course the Communist ones)
entailed the exploitation and degradation of indigenous peoples. Even
those of us who may not necessarily believe this to be the case, and in
fact see many positives for indigenous peoples in their subjugation to
European rule, fail to confidently articulate such a position because of
the overwhelming social and cultural success of the leftist argument.
This is despite often incongruous pockets of support for European
imperialism, notably that of Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish coiner of the
term ‘genocide,’ who asserted that empire enabled the diffusion of
culture, enabling weaker societies “to adopt the institutions of more
efficient ones or become absorbed by them because they better fulfil
basic needs.”[6]
Scholarly titles offering a full-blooded apologetic for European imperialism, such as The Triumph of the West
(1985) by J.M. Roberts, would struggle to get published in today’s
academic climate, but Roberts’s honest comments on the dualistic nature
of European colonialism, and ultimate rejection of perpetual guilt, bear
repeating:
If we wish to reassure ourselves about our own moral sensibility, we need only to recognize that the bearers of western civilisation have often behaved with deliberate cruelty and ruthlessness towards other peoples, that some of them plundered their victims of wealth and their environment of resources, and that still others, even when more scrupulous or well-meaning, casually released shattering side-effects on societies and cultures they neither understood nor tried to understand. For centuries, many Europeans and many European peoples outside Europe showed astonishing cultural arrogance towards the rest of humanity. In doing so, they behaved much as men of power have always behaved in any vigorous civilization. What was different was just that they had so much more power than any earlier conquerors, and even more convincing grounds for feeling they were entitled to use it. All that said, if we are seriously concerned about our own sensitivity to ethical nuance, we ought also to recognize that administrators, missionaries, teachers were often right in thinking that they brought valuable gifts to non-Europeans. Those gifts included gentler standards of behavior towards the weak, the ideal of a more objective justice, the intellectual rigor of science, its fruits in better health and technology, and many other good things.[7]
It
goes without saying that the “good things” mentioned by Roberts are
excluded entirely from current discussions of colonialism, which forfeit
honest confrontation with the past in favor of pursuing the promotion
of ‘White guilt,’ excusing the failures of predominantly African
populations (non-African former colonies like Singapore appear to have
succeeded greatly both during and after their experience of European
empire), and facilitating ethnic revenge. These ambitions have of course
been nurtured in the West’s non-White populations for some time by the
same cliques in academia, the media, and the wider culture. In just one
particularly egregious example, in The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam Douglas
Murray cites the Jewish academic, novelist, and journalist Will Self as
telling one television audience that British identity was nothing more
than “going overseas and subjugating black and brown people and taking
their stuff and the fruits of their labours. That was a core part of the
British identity, was the British Empire.”[8]
There
is of course a substantial overlap not only in the self-comforting
content of Jewish and African revenge fantasies, but also in their
narrative structure. Just as narratives of Jewish victimhood rely on
strict definitions of anti-Semitism (perpetrated by irrational Whites
against innocent Jews), and a cropped timeline of events (often starting
‘spontaneously’ in 1933, Tsarist Russia, or the Crusades), the colonial
grievance industry relies on strict definitions of colonialism
(perpetrated by Whites and universally exploitative and abusive) and a
cropped history of imperialism that begins only with the European age of
expansion. The similarity may be regarded as due to the fact that Jews
have been dominant in the production of ‘White guilt’ academic
literature on empire and slavery (an excellent example being Peter
Kolchin’s American Slavery, 1619–1877), as well as popular cultural products of the same timbre (e.g. Steven Spielberg’s Amistad). Also, just as Jews are often portrayed as uniquely innocent, Blacks are today said to be incapable of ‘racism.’
Such
simplified narratives of both colonialism and anti-Semitism imply that
Blacks and Jews are incapable of ambition, greed, cruelty or hostility
toward outgroups — an intellectual position worthy of ridicule were it
not for the fact it enjoys substantial, if logically inexplicable,
status and influence in modern culture and academia.
Equally
understated in contemporary discussions of colonial scenarios is the
role of native elites, an area that I am particularly interested in.
I’ve long regarded the Jewish presence in Europe and European societies
as a unique form of colonialism (though without the “good things”
mentioned by Roberts), and this presence has been demonstrably reliant
from its very early beginnings on co-operation with native European
elites, as well as being very tenuous during times of political
instability. Similarly, A. Dirk Moses warns against the adoption of
narratives of colonialism which “regard the encounter between European
and Indigene as grossly asymmetric, thereby playing down both indigenous
agency and the often-tenuous European grip on power, particularly in
the early stages of colonization. In German Southwest Africa, for
instance, the German governor was initially reliant on local chiefs.”[9]
Moses has stated elsewhere that Germans during the Weimar Republic
“regarded themselves as an indigenous people who were being slowly
colonized by foreigners, namely Jews.”[10]
Even Raphael Lemkin himself once stated that colonialism involved a
situation whereby the subjugated group was “a majority controlled by a
powerful minority,” perhaps missing entirely the profundity of such a
statement when applied to the activities of his own people.[11]
The power of the minority often intermingled with the power of
self-interested native elites. Thus, just as European understandings of
the Jewish Question would be woefully incomplete without a confrontation
of the issue of venal and treasonous European elites, so the attempts
by post-colonial ethnic groups to place exclusive blame for their
grievances on Europeans are equally inadequate.
Similarities
between the European experience under Jewish influence, and the African
experience under European empire are of course limited. As stated
above, European influence in Africa was a net benefit, bringing manifold
cultural, social, and technological benefits to African societies. No
similar claim could be made about Jewish influence at any point in
European history. Nor should Europeans get into the contemporary African
habit of engaging in a morality-based ‘blame game’ as a means of trying
to ‘decolonize’ our own nations — either of Jewish influence, or the
presence of millions of newcomers from all corners of the earth. Unlike
Africans, our people are remarkably successful, often against all odds
and despite the negative machinations of outsiders and the corruption of
their own elites. If we accept Moses’s assertion that colonization and
imperialism represent a kind of pinnacle in the universal human
participation in competition, then we should be wary of imbuing that
competition with too much redundant moralism.
The
avoidance of moralism is perhaps even more necessary for a people such
as ourselves, for whom moral concerns are primary; a kind of racial
Achilles heel. Simply put, we are unlikely to find success in wielding a
weapon to which we are uniquely vulnerable. Our struggle against
invaders, both old and new, should be based on the obvious truth that it
is quite simply in our interests to defend the homogenous nature of our
territory as a means of promoting a safe and successful future for our
children. This is where our ‘moral’ code should begin and end.
Finally,
it is worth remarking upon the rhetorical bankruptcy and transparent
agenda of slogans calling for the ‘decolonization’ of academia, English
literature, and our public spaces. Decolonization, by almost any
definition, implies that a ‘thing’ existed in some state prior to
colonization. Looked at bluntly, a complete decolonization of African
society would entail a total return to the pre-imperial state of the
African tribes, stripped of the positive cultural ‘diffusions’ described
by Lemkin, affirmed by Moses, and praised by Roberts. There is almost
certainly not a single African alive today, either in Africa or living
among other peoples, who would willingly engage in such a total
‘decolonization.’ For one thing, it would imply an enormous loss in
population given that the recent dramatic upsurge in African population has been fueled by Western technology and medicine.
Applied
within White societies or to academic subjects of White origin such as
English literature, ‘decolonization’ is technically impossible, at
least from the Black perspective, because both the prior and existing
state of the ‘thing’ is White, technologically and culturally advanced,
etc. What Blacks truly mean, whether they understand the dialectical
tricks devised by those inciting them or not, is that they want a colonization.
They want to colonize White nations, White spaces, White literature
with a Black or multi-ethnic presence that was never there at any prior
time. Efforts to invent or exaggerate, for example, a sub-Saharan
presence in Roman Britain are intended to construct a mythical
multicultural ‘prior state’ that ‘decolonization’ will return us to. But
these are malicious fictions. The discourse of ‘decolonization’ is
simply a mask for the ongoing colonization of the West.
Notes
[1] A.D. Moses (ed), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2008), p.3.
[2] Ibid, p.4.
[3] Ibid, p.5.
[4] Ibid, p.9.
[5] Quoted in M. Cross and M. Keith (eds), Racism, the City and the State (London: Routledge, 1993), p.181.
[6] Moses (ed), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, p.11.
[7] J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West (London: Guild Publishing, 1985), p.430.
[8] D. Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p.33.
[9] Moses (ed), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, p.16.
[10] A. D. Moses, ‘Colonialism,’ in P. Hayes & J.K. Roth, The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.72.
[11] Ibid, p.9.
(Republished from The Occidental Observer by permission of author or representative)
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