Colonization, Replaceable Man, and Love of One’s Own

Remarks to ISI’s American Politics and Government Summit (November 2024)

Last autumn I was invited to deliver some remarks at a conference hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. I spoke as part of a panel on the growing relevance of the much-unfairly maligned French thinker Renaud Camus, originator of the constantly-mischaracterized “Great Replacement” (which is not a “conspiracy theory,” as Camus explicitly posits no conspiracy, but simply an observation of the fact of sweeping cultural and demographic change produced by liquid liberal-modernity). Because my remarks drew on my previous writing here on colonialism and “anti-colonial struggle,” I decided to not bother posting them on Substack. But the much-deserved ongoing firestorm in the UK over grooming gangs, migration, and the British state’s deliberate abandonment of the nation’s own children in the name of multiculturalism led me to revisit the brief speech, which seemed more relevant now than ever. So here you go. – N.S. Lyons

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In his writings, Renaud Camus strikingly, if briefly, describes the ongoing replacement of Western peoples and cultures as a form of “counter-colonization,” or sometimes simply as “colonization” full-stop. I find this word very intriguing, colonization. Because while Camus naturally speaks of colonization in the context of mass migration – highlighting the irony of Europe’s former colonial powers being overrun by the very peoples they once colonized – I think there’s actually much more to the idea than that.

In fact, if we do start thinking of the Western world as having been subject to a process of colonization, it can help us explain not only the phenomenon of uncontrolled mass migration, but also the much broader notion “replaceism” that Camus has sacrificed his reputation in polite society to try to catalogue and describe. Moreover it can, I believe, also explain the real root causes of the cultural decline and political strife we see consuming the West today, including the great populist backlash we’ve recently seen expressed in the U.S. election.

So, setting aside the woke left-wing rants about “decolonization” that we’ve all grown used, I think we ought to take a real look at what the process of colonialism actually does involve, practically and historically.

Almost universally, the first imperative of colonialism is de-nationalization. Colonialism is something waged by empires – supranational political entities that control many different nations, or peoples, under one imperial umbrella. The antithesis of empire is national identity and national self-determination. Which is why the chief task of any colonial occupier is so often the suppression or erasure of a ruled population’s conception of themselves as a coherent people, with a distinct cultural identity and a delimited historical territory.

The second imperative of colonialism is, similarly, a process of deculturalization. It is the stripping away of a people’s traditional culture, customs, beliefs, values, and language. It is a deliberate severing of historical roots and abolition of historical memory, including through censorship, propaganda, indoctrination, and desacralization of a people’s traditional religion. Often it is specifically children who are targeted for programs of reeducation, sometimes even deliberately removed from the culture of their parents so they can be raised apart. This deculturalization is liable to be presented as a benevolent civilizing process, the liberation of a people from their backwards, barbaric, provincial ways, so that they may adopt the superior cultural values and ways of life of their advanced colonial masters.

To maintain control as they engage in this process of denationalization and deculturalization, a colonial power is likely to employ a particularly characteristic strategy of divide and rule: they establish a social and political hierarchy that artificially privileges one or more chosen ethnic or religious minority groups to rule over the native majority. The empire does so because it knows that minority groups in such a multi-cultural administrative system are likely to remain far more loyal to the empire than to their nation, having been taught to fear the prospect of national democratic rule by a majority which indeed often comes to resent them. Racial and sectarian tensions begin to boil.

Meanwhile, the cultural and political dispossession of a native people is inevitably accompanied by economic dispossession and exploitation. Gradually or all at once, what was once theirs is taken from them and redistributed to the colonizers and their preferred client groups. Natives’ land may be seized, or overbearing laws, taxes, and regulations leveraged to gradually make it less and less economically feasible for them to retain ownership of their businesses and property. The empire may also deliberately subvert national industry, preventing economic challenges to its international monopolies. Financial methods may be used to exploit the nation and its people by trapping them in a complex web of inescapable debts.

And native people themselves are strip-mined for their value as human resources. They may be used as cheap labor, or conscripted as military cannon fodder and sent abroad to fight the empire’s foreign wars; or, more cleverly, the empire will steadily siphon off the brightest and most promising young natives, draining them away from their hometowns to distant metropolitan capitals, to be decultured, reeducated, and coopted into serving the trans-national imperial system as “people from nowhere.”

But of course among the most traumatic forms of dispossession a colonial power can inflict on a nation is something far more fundamentally transformative. It is the displacement of a native people from their ancestral land and way of life accomplished via the mass inward migration of an outside group, whether the colonizers themselves or another people. As their demographic and cultural majority is weakened by this human tide, natives’ relative political voice and control over institutions and resources is inexorably undermined; soon they find themselves strangers in their own land.

This is a colonial strategy of terrible and permanent effectiveness. It is one that the People’s Republic of China, for example, has in our own time used very successfully in the territories of Tibet and Xinjiang, where it has transferred millions of Han Chinese settlers in to dilute and assimilate the local ethnic populations, transforming them into weak, isolated minorities, with a degraded identity of ever having been a distinct people.

In truth, once such an underhanded invasion has been completed, there is no going back for a nation – they have been effectively erased from the map, and from history. And so, when such inward migration is, as in China, also combined with efforts to actively reduce the population of the native group over time, such as through the suppression of fertility, this is today rightfully recognized in international law as a form of genocide.

Natives are of course naturally unlikely to take such colonial dispossession lying down, and tend to try to revolt against their oppressors, so the final imperative of colonialism is the establishment of a comprehensive system of enforcement and control. Secret police, surveillance and censorship, restrictions on freedom of association… all such heavy-handed measures tend to play their role as fear is used to keep the local systems in line.

But there is a more subtle method generally employed too: the elevation of authority and decision-making into a supranational apparatus of imperial bureaucracy which is deliberately complex and inscrutable to the native. With decrees handed down by his far-away metropolitan betters like declarations dispatched from the heights of some unseen Mount Olympus, he is conditioned to assume that any challenge to the vast machine of empire would be impossible, pointless, and against the whole inevitable tide of civilization and progress.

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Now, I suspect that, as I’ve described these aspects of colonialism – the denationalization, deculturalization, division, dispossession, and domination – many of you listening may have had the uncomfortable recognition that these forces seem to have been at work in your own nation. Because nearly everywhere across the Western world, the symptoms are the same…

Oikophobic ruling elites that openly and regularly express their fear, loathing, and contempt for the majority of their native countrymen, whom they view as deplorably backwards, uncouth, uncivilized, and really little better than savages. A concerted campaign by these elites to make people feel ashamed of and ready to atone for their past, their ancestors, their traditional culture, values, ways of life, and even their inherited ethnicity.

Widespread erasure of cultural touchstones, and the pervasive rewriting of national histories to scrub away any signs or sources of national distinctiveness, unity, or pride. Attempts to indoctrinate new generations into an entirely new, universalized set of more “progressive” (read: civilized) values, and to induct them into a wholly artificial pseudo-culture of cosmopolitan multi-culturalism, divorced from any coherent national geography, inherited identity, or memory.

Persistent efforts to elevate sovereign decision-making from the level of democratic nations to distant supranational (read: imperial) bodies, and to reduce every Western country to Justin Trudeau’s proposed vision for Canada: a, quote, “post-national state” where “there is no core identity” – only an arbitrary outline on a map, representing little more than a special economic zone amenable to our modern species of East India companies.

And, most glaringly of all of course, an unrelenting torrent of mass migration: a culture- and demography-shaking tidal wave that, despite years of overwhelming public outcry, has gone wholly unopposed by governing elites across the West.

There is, it seems to me, simply no more succinct way to accurately describe this state of affairs than as a strange form of colonialism. But who or what is colonizing us? Is it some great foreign power bent on our conquest? No, clearly not. It is our own regimes that seem to have decided to do this to us, their own people, on their own accord. The West seems to be the first civilization in history that is in the process of colonizing itself.

But why? Is there some treasonous conspiracy at work? This is where Camus’ insight is so helpful. He reminds us that no conspiracy is needed to explain the West’s self-inflicted colonization. Only the overwhelming force of modernity that he calls replacism: the “marriage of convenience” between post-war antiracist moralism and global managerial capitalism, which seeks a world that is truly open because it is truly flat. A safe, conflict-free world, in which any inefficient and dangerously prickly particularities and differences between peoples, produced by past, place, and preference, have been sanded away. In which the defining achievement of technocratic progress will be “the global interchangeability of peoples” – interchangeable like cogs in a machine.

Or, alternately, one in which mankind is transformed into, as Camus puts it strikingly, a “Nutella Man,” a homogenized “paste without lumps or clots” – mere “undifferentiated human matter” available to be spread smoothly wherever economic expediency requires. But, as he writes, “such stabilization by these means was only possible if one imagined completely abstract men and women, naked ones so to speak, reduced to themselves neutered of all origin, all belonging, and also all culture.”

This then is what is colonizing us: not so much a worldly empire as a conceptual one, a utopian ideal of perfect order, a global managerial machine that seeks through its great and beneficent colonial project to erase not just any specific nation, but the very idea of a nation; not just a culture, but the very idea of a culture; not just a people but the very idea of a people.

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As you may have noticed recently, however, all across the West the natives are growing restless. Many of us are not content to see our past erased, our cultures trashed, our nations dissolved. Suddenly, many find themselves united by a so-called “populist” backlash. This might be more accurately described as a shared anti-colonial struggle. Once more the world rings with cries for national sovereignty and self-determination –but this time for our own nations of the West. Decolonization, it turns out, might be the great cause of social justice in our time after all!

On that note, let me conclude with one final observation that I think is quite important. The ideology of replacism, and the global flattening machine that it animates – which seeks to transform the whole world into what Mary Harrington describes as the stiflingly inhuman “nomos of the airport” – this machine is, in its cold mechanism, practically defined by its complete lack of love.

To love something or someone is to cherish them precisely for their unique particularity. At least for us mere mortals, universal love is an impossibility and an oxymoron. Tell a woman you love her, but only insofar as you love all women as a universal category, and I promise this will not go well for you…

The total absence of genuine love in the project of replacist globalism can help us see the reality of its opposite: that the animating force of nationalism, which we see burgeoning anew today, is not hatred of otherness but the love of one’s own. And that the way out of the replacist nightmare is for us indeed to be found in love: love of people, past, place, and particularity.

So I urge you all to keep that in mind, and to take pride when you take up the banner of anti-colonial struggle – as I do hope you all will, wherever you hail from – and begin to make your nation great again! Thank you.