The West’s Anti-Colonial Struggle is Real

Just not in the direction typically assumed

“Colonization” and “decolonization” are hot topics these days. You can hardly set foot in an Anglo-American or European classroom, book store, or museum anymore without some leftie lecturing you about the need to “decolonize” everything in sight. Well, I always like to give people a fair hearing, so I figured I it was worth taking a deeper dive into the topic of colonialism in order to broaden my understanding. And it turns out that those folx may be onto something! I am now woke to colonial injustice, and even won over on the urgent need for decolonization. Though maybe not in quite the way they’d assumed. So please glue yourself to the floor and join me for an educational lecture on the enduring relevance of the colonial menace.

Let’s begin with a summary of the core aspects that have historically defined colonialism and colonial rule, as I’ve distilled here from the many decades of study and writing that have been conducted on the topic (mainly by left-wing scholars):

De-nationalization: Colonization proceeds hand-in-hand with empire and imperial rule. An empire is defined and distinguished from a normal nation-state by its exercise of domineering control over many different nations, or peoples, within a single political entity. This control may be direct, with the empire occupying and annexing these nations’ traditional territory. Or it may be indirect, with the empire allowing nations under its control to govern themselves mostly autonomously but demanding their tribute and fealty to its ultimate authority. The antithesis of empire is national self-determination, or the ability of nations large or small to fully rule themselves independently and to determine their own destinies without interference from above and abroad. Which is why, during the last great wave of decolonization that swept the world in the decades after WWII, the struggle for national self-determination was practically synonymous with anti-colonial struggle (and democratization). Hence a chief task of any determined colonial ruler is often de-nationalization, or 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.

Division: As an aid to suppressing national self-determination, empires have very commonly utilized a particular “divide and rule” strategy: setting up one or more sub-national ethnic, religious, or other minority groups to rule over a local majority population. This minority-rule system works well for an empire, as the minority group then owes its position of power and privilege to imperial authority, and – fearing what it might lose if the national majority were ever allowed to rule – is therefore understandably far more loyal to the empire than to the nation in which they reside. The minority then also has an incentive to collaborate with the empire’s effort to de-nationalize the majority. The majority, for its part, often soon grows more and more resentful of the minority. E.g. the Belgians infamous use of colonial Rwanda’s Tutsi tribal minority to rule over its Hutu majority led to the buildup of explosive grievance politics and eventually genocide. But generally the empire is fine with the growth of this kind of anger: it would much rather a national majority’s rage be directed at a local scapegoat than the empire itself.

This was the general strategy famously employed to great effect by, for example, the British Raj in India and the French in Syria and Lebanon. But it was hardly a European innovation, having been used by various empires for millennia. The Ottoman Empire’s “Millet System,” for example, was a system of “multi-cultural” imperial administration, in which religious and ethnic minority groups across the empire were granted autonomy and even special privileges – to such a degree that official recognition as a minority group became something of a prized status for which various groups would actively lobby the Sultan.[1] The Ottoman elite would then tap these loyal minorities for administrative and military talent. This helped keep their expansive empire relatively stable for centuries.

Deculturalization and Demoralization: Deculturalization is the process of stripping a people of their traditional culture, customs, beliefs, values, and language, and forcibly replacing these with those of a new dominant group. Unlike acculturation or assimilation, which is an individual’s choice to join an existing dominant culture, deculturalization is a coercive process waged from the top down. It involves the deliberate severing of historical roots and abolition of historical memory, including through censorship, propaganda, indoctrination, and desacralization. For practical reasons, deculturalization’s primary target is usually children, whom the colonial regime aims to isolate and reeducate so that they become an entire generation left with no knowledge of their independent past or any sense of their traditional identity. In some cases in history colonial regimes have gone so far as to regularly remove children from their native parents in order to raise them entirely within the colonial culture.

Often, deculturalization is accompanied by a concerted campaign of deliberate demoralization, or the attempt to convince a people that everything about their culture, ways of life, or race as a whole is inferior, backwards, and barbaric, and that they would be better off adopting the cultural values and ways of life of their colonial masters, who are obviously their civilized betters. In fact the whole process of colonization may be presented as (and even genuinely seen by the colonizer as) a beneficent civilizing process. Sometimes, however, demoralization is more purely literal and direct, and intended less to convert than to merely pacify by any useful means. When the British Empire managed to hook large swathes of the Chinese population on opium, leaving them addicted, dependent, and literally passed out in drug dens, this was a highly successful means of pacifying them and undermining any energetic resistance to colonial exploitation.

Displacement and Dispossession: Of course, the cultural dispossession of a people is usually also accompanied by an economic and physical dispossession. What was once their property is, gradually or all at once, taken from them and redistributed to the colonizers and their privileged elite groups. This may involve the removal of the people from their land, including by forced migration, or simply by policies that make it, over time, more and more economically impossible for them to retain ownership. Obviously uprooting a people from their traditional land is also beneficial to the colonizer’s effort to denationalize and deculture them.

But sometimes this displacement is more thoroughly completed through another means: the deliberate mass inward migration of an outside group (either the colonizer population themselves or a chosen minority group) into the lands of the colonized in order to reduce their demographic and cultural majority, undermine their control of land and resources, and weaken their political voice. This is a strategy that the People’s Republic of China, for example, has used quite successfully in Tibet and Xinjiang, where it has transferred millions of Han Chinese settlers in to dilute the local ethnic populations. In the most severe cases, when inward migration is combined with efforts to actively reduce the population of the native group over time, such as through the suppression of their fertility, this strategy is today internationally recognized as a form of genocide.

At the broadest level, displacement and dispossession is about more than just material theft. To the natives, it is a whole way of life that is taken from them and permanently replaced with something alien, unrecognizable, and entirely unasked-for. At its worst, it means that not only their way of life, but they themselves are doomed to be replaced – reduced to ruins, artifacts, and myth in their own former homeland.

Exploitation: Meanwhile, at a day-to-day level, colonization is characterized by one form or another of the exploitation of the native people and their land by the colonizer. This often includes the strip-mining of the nation’s various resources to ship aboard, with the profits flowing to the colonizers rather than benefitting the people of the nation. There often appears, however, a class of natives quite willing to sell out their nation by helping to facilitate its exploitation in exchange for wealth and status lavished on them by the colonial empire; these collaborators are known as “compradors,” or the native agents of a foreign power. Often the empire also deliberately subverts the colonized state’s local industries, or prevents their emergence, so as to reduce any competition that could potentially threaten its own international economic monopolies. Financial methods are also often used to exploit the nation and its people, trapping them in a complex web of inescapable debts. Naturally, colonial exploitation typically includes the direct exploitation of native labor, working them hard to produce profits without fair compensation (or any compensation). Occasionally the natives are conscripted as military cannon fodder and sent abroad to fight the empire’s foreign wars. At their most sophisticated, empires cleverly strip-mine the native population themselves as a human resource, sucking up the brightest and most promising natives and draining them away to other nations or metropolitan capitals to be reeducated and coopted into serving the trans-national imperial system.

Enforcement and Systemization: Of course all this exploitation and dispossession tends to make the natives angry and liable to try to revolt and throw off the colonial yoke, so the colonial power must establish a strict system of enforcement and protect its control over the local majority. Secret police, surveillance and censorship, restrictions on freedom of association, sturdy black-box prisons, and the occasional massacre of uppity rebels/protestors usually do the trick. Fear will usually keep the local systems in line.

But there is a more subtle and comprehensive means of control that works effectively too: the systemization of imperial authority and its bureaucratic administration into an all-consuming “rule by law” managerial apparatus that is deliberately complex, elevated, distant, and almost wholly inscrutable to the native. Proceeding hand-in-hand with the campaigns of demoralization, the native is made to feel that decisions about his nation and even his own future are something simply out of his hands – something to instead rightfully be handed down by his far-away betters like declarations dispatched from the heights of some unseen Mount Olympus. In this way he is conditioned to assume that to challenge the vast machine of the empire would be impossible, pointless, and against the whole inevitable tide of civilization.

The Over-Empire

That then is roughly what colonialism has looked like wherever and whenever it has reared its ugly head over the centuries. But, maybe all this history sounds a bit, well… uncomfortably familiar to you, dear Western reader? Perhaps, reviewing its characteristic deprivations, you even suspect that this ravenous beast could actually be the very same one that seems to be devouring you piece-by-piece this very moment?

That’s because it is. 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 beat their people until they understand that they ought to feel utterly ashamed of and ready to atone for their past, their ancestors, their traditional culture, values, and ways of life, and even their inherited ethnicity. Widespread, deliberate destruction of any public markers honoring unique cultural touchstones, and the pervasive rewriting of national histories to scrub them of any potential signs or sources of national distinctiveness, unity, or pride. Attempts to indoctrinate new generations into an entirely new, universalized set of more “progressive” (i.e. civilized) values, and to induct them into a wholly artificial “culture” of cosmopolitan multi-culturalism, divorced from any coherent national geography, inherited identity, or memory. Concerted efforts to elevate all sovereign decision-making from the level of democratic nations to distant supranational (read: imperial) bodies, and to transform every Western nation into Justin Trudeau’s proposed vision for Canada: a “post-national state” where “there is no core identity” – just an arbitrary outline on a map, representing little more than a special economic zone appetizing to our modern species of East India companies. And, most glaringly of all, the utterly unrelenting torrent of mass inward migration: a culture- and demography-shaking tidal wave that, despite years of overwhelming public outcry, remains not only unopposed but actively facilitated by governing elites across the West – the same elites who have spoken openly of their desire to grab their native populations by the hair and “rub [their] noses in diversity.”

There is, it seems to me, simply no more succinct way to accurately describe this ongoing state of affairs than as a form of colonialism. It more than fits the definition. What the citizens of the West are experiencing is dispossession of their homelands and cultures by a rapacious conqueror. But who is this colonizer? Is it some great foreign power bent on conquest? No, clearly not. It is our own regimes that seem to have decided to do this to us on their own accord. But why?

Paul Kingsnorth, drawing on the poet Robert Bly, has offered one adroit way of interpreting this phenomenon: that systematic ideological rejection of our heritage has produced an “inward colonialism” powered by a “culture of inversion.” This inversion, he notes, “has not come about because new things are loved, but because old things are despised.” The result is essentially a civilizational suicide cult:

No conservative, Bly could nevertheless see that the culture of inversion, already in full swing in the 1990s, was a product of the elite left, who had ‘taken over the role of colonial administrators’, and set about colonising – or should we say ‘decolonising’? – their own culture from within:

They teach that European kings were major criminals who dressed well, that feudalism in the Middle Ages was a transparent failure, that the Renaissance amounted to a triumph of false consciousness, that the Magna Carta solved nothing, that the English Royalists were decadent hedonists, that the Puritan governments were brutal, that Mother Theresa was probably sexually disturbed, that the New England town meetings were masks for oppression … that Beethoven wrote imperialist music, that Mencken was a secret fascist, that Roosevelt encouraged Pearl Harbour, that President Kennedy’s Peace Corps did not work, that Freud supported child abuse, and that almost every one of his ideas was wrong.

America, said Bly was ‘the first culture in history that has colonised itself.’ Twenty five years on, America’s fate is also the fate of Britain and other European nations. Our internal colonisers have been ruthlessly effective in the intervening decades, and the ‘culture war’ is a product of their success:

If colonialist administrators begin by attacking the vertical thought of the tribe they have conquered, and dismantling the elder system, they end by dismantling everything in sight. That’s where we are.

I think this is obviously true, yet incomplete. It is not that our various national cultures, as embodied by majorities actually living them, have turned on themselves. Rather, what we are seeing is many disparate nations and cultures of the West being simultaneously colonized by the same small, trans-national group of technocratic elites, who no longer identify with or have any loyalty to their own people and who are hell-bent on universally imposing their own authority and identical set of beliefs and values everywhere around the world.

So in a sense there is an over-arching “empire” colonizing us, but this is an empire without a name and without borders – for it actively disdains such distinctions. It is an empire with perhaps the most lunatic ambition of any in history: to rule at a truly global level, controlling the fate of the entire planet and all the masses of humanity, whom it treats as mere interchangeable raw material for its schemes. This would-be global empire (which Kingsnorth appropriately refers to as the “Machine”) is not just the product of Western cultural guilt and self-hatred. It is, as I’ve described before at length, the inevitable outcome of the managerialism that has come to dominate our world.

Managerialism, being utterly utopian, technocratic, and universalist in nature (in other words: desiring to manage all things), fears and despises above all else any differentiation, particularism, boundaries, or decentralization. The idea that something, anything, could permanently stand beyond the reach of its homogenizing control is to it a prospect that is completely intolerable. So everything everywhere around the globe must be brought under its imperial control, broken down, flattened, homogenized, and opened up to everything else. It is not just any specific nation that this managerial “empire” seeks to undermine through its colonialism, but the very idea of a nation. It is not just a culture that it is trying to erase, but the very idea of a culture. Not just a people but the very idea of a people.

This is the assault that we in the West are facing today. But, more and more frequently now, alarming rumblings reach even our imperial satraps, cloistered together in their metropolitan redoubts: the natives are reported to be restless; their frustration at the oppression, exploitation, and cultural imperialism they’ve been subjected to beginning to boil over. Uppity national “populist” movements seem to keep appearing and attempting to “take back control.” Bizarrely, this response to their predations seems to genuinely baffle the global elite and the comprador class. “What,” they wonder, “did we ever bring these barbaric blokes other than enlightenment, civilization, and opportunity to participate in a globalized economic marketplace?” Why do they not welcome the vibrant benefits of the unlimited free movement of human resources? Why, they ask with real confusion, is it now so often that some little incident – like that one time they tried to trans the peasants’ Bud Light – is the straw that breaks the back of the viceroy’s elephant?

Now that you are woke to the colonial menace, however, you can point out the truth: the recurring rage of native peasants across the West is not about the queering of their beer, or any other tiny flashpoint in some petty “culture war” – it’s about society-spanning anti-colonial struggle. It’s about their desperate effort to throw off the increasingly heavy technocratic chains forged by their would-be imperial masters, masters who actively seek to erase their entire identity and way of life – and indeed to effectively reduce the entire world to the equivalent of one gigantic, soulless airport lounge. This struggle – the actual decolonial task of our day – still remains inchoate and scattered. But it won’t forever. Someday we may even, God willing, see in our time a new wave of decolonization sweep the West.

For their part, colonial administrators have to date reacted to these ongoing native rebellions entirely in character: by seeking to impose more and more draconian enforcement mechanisms to maintain their control of the natives by attempting to crush, silence, and gaslight them (aka by “protecting democracy”). This isn’t going to make the natives any less angry, or any less convinced that they only have everything to lose if they don’t soon take a firm stand.

Perhaps it might benefit these diverse, indigenous anti-managerial rebels if they consciously took on some of the framing and tactics of anti-colonial movements of the past. In particular, they might proudly appropriate the hallowed left-wing notion of international solidarity. There is no contradiction whatsoever in disparate and sometimes disagreeable “nationalist-populist” movements working together and supporting each other across the globe. Ultimately all of these movements are in a way really one movement, for they seek the same goal: national self-determination – the ancient, enduring dream, alive even in our present age, “that small nations might be free.”[2]

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[1] Credit to

Niccolo Soldo

for first pointing out somewhere the Millet System’s many similarities to regimes today. I hope he expands on the idea in more detail in the future.

[2]